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THE PRINCIPLE OF 

INDIVIDUALITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY 

OF THOMAS HILL GREEN 



A THESIS 

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 

of Cornell University for the Degree of 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



BY 



HARVEY GATES TOWNSEND, A.B, 



PRESS OF 

THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY 

LANCASTER, PA. 



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PREFACE. 

In this monograph no attempt will be made to deal with 
Green's ethical or political theories, the purpose being rather to 
examine and define the deeper lying metaphysical principles of 
which his ethical and political philosophy is but the expression. 
Such an aim is in keeping with the spirit of Green's philosophy, 
for he himself tells us that a metaphysic of morals is "the proper 
foundation, though not the whole, of every system of Ethics" 
{Prolegomena to Ethics, sec. 2.) It is common enough to deny 
that there is any vital connection between ethics and meta- 
physics, and this opinion was probably just as common when 
Green wrote as it is today, as the Introduction to the Pro- 
legomena clearly shows. With the arguments again which may 
be brought in support of either side of this question the present 
study is not concerned; for however such a controversy may 
eventuate in the abstract, we are not at liberty when we discuss 
Green's ethics to neglect his own view of the matter. For if" 
he believed, as he most certainly did, that his ethics was inti- 
mately and organically bound up with his metaphysics, we 
would be greatly increasing our chances of failure to understand 
his ethics by a refusal to study his metaphysics. A lack of 
deep appreciation of the metaphysics has, I believe, vitiated a 
great deal of the criticism of the later, and perhaps more dog- 
matic parts of Green's system. Taking the position that he 
did, he had a right to assume that his reader would become 
familiar with his metaphysics and, in case of a disagreement, 
that the discussion would embrace a consideration of meta- 
physical principles rather than confine itself to a disputation 
about rules of morality from the uncritical or factual stand- 
point of ordinary life. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance 
for the understanding of Green's philosophy that we first become 
acquainted with the principles of his metaphysics. 

Green's social theory, which includes the application of his 
philosophy to moral, political, educational, or religious situa- 

iii 



IV PREFACE. 

tions, reveals throughout a philosophic or speculative motive. 
He was not one of those who seem content to live from hand to 
mouth in philosophy, lost in the flux of experience as it comes; 
but he was above all anxious to 'see life steadily and to see it 
whole.' A fragment was never to him a mere piece of something 
or other to be accepted unreflectingly, but it was a challenge 
which set his mind to reconstruct the concrete whole of which it 
is a part, and it led him ultimately to a view of the whole uni- 
verse. It is this motive in his philosophy with which we are 
here concerned. What did he do toward exhibiting the unity 
and variety of experience? (This is, of course, to be distin- 
guished from the question sometimes asked, Is there any unity 
in experience? If there is to be any immediate datum of con- 
sciousness the unity is unquestionably as immediate as the 
variety.) In a word, the question is not, Is the world one or 
many? But, How is the world one and many? This question 
is as old as the history of philosophy and has been uniformly 
looked upon as a question of a fundamental kind. "If I find 
any man," says Socrates, "who is able to see unity and plurality 
in nature, him I follow and walk in his steps as if he were a God" 
(Phaedrus, 266.) The purpose of the following discussion, 
therefore, is to set forth Green's metaphysic of the one and the 
many, as given in his treatment of the individual, introducing 
only as much illustrative material and application as is neces- 
sary to hold fast the central idea. 

The individual may be defined at once as the concrete em- 
bodiment of particularity and universality, that is to say, the 
individual is both one and many. We shall follow Green's 
attempt to explain the category of individuality and to apply it 
successively to the object, the subject, and finally, to the uni- 
verse as a whole, conceived as a subject-object complex. As a 
basis for such a study it seemed wise to begin with an examination 
of the problem and method of Green's metaphysics in order to' 
dispel a misunderstanding regarding his position on these points 
which has, I think, stood in the way of a correct interpretation 
of his entire system of philosophy. 

I am grateful to Professor J. E. Creighton and to other mem- 



PREFACE. V 

bers of the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy for criticism 

and guidance in the preparation of this monograph, and to my 

wife for valuable assistance in verifying references and reading 

proof. 

Northampton, Mass., 
August 3, 1914. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Preface iii 

Chapter I. The Problem and Method of Green's Meta- 
physics I 

Chapter II. The Individuality of the Object 18 

Chapter III. The Implications of Objectivity 35 

Chapter IV. The Individuality of the Subject 46 

Chapter V. God: The Complete Individual 67 

Index 91 



Vll 



THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY IN THE 
PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS HILL GREEN 



CHAPTER I. 



THE PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 

"About Locke, as about every other philosopher, the essen- 
tial questions are, What was his problem, and what was his 
method?" 1 Thus, at the beginning of his introduction to 
Hume, Green expressed his idea of the true way to study a 
system of philosophy. Three years later he wrote: "When 
we understand what the questions exactly were that a philosopher 
put to himself, and how he came to put them as he did, we are 
more than half-way towards understanding the answer." 2 In 
undertaking a serious examination of a fundamental conception 
of Green's philosophy we can do no better than to follow the 
spirit expressed in the above words, for if these statements are 
true regarding any philosophy they are peculiarly true of Green's. 
He was a pioneer in England of the form of thought commonly 
known as German Idealism. He broke away from the common- 
sense method of English Empiricism and substituted for it 
a logical criticism almost if not quite as subtle and as unusual 
as that of Hegel himself. His thought was a reaction against 
the dominant empiricism of his day and especially against the 
loose and hasty application of biological theory to metaphysical 
and ethical questions. Although his treatment of evolution 
shows that he grasped the real significance as well as the limita- 

1 Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by R. L. Nettleship. Longmans, Green, 
and Co., 1885. Vol. I, p. 5, (Hereafter referred to merely by volume and page.) 
The essay in which the quotation occurs was first published in 1874 as an intro- 
duction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in an edition of Hume's Works 
edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. 

8 III, 134. 

I 



2 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

tions of Darwin's results, we must remember that he wrote in 
reply to evolutionary theory without the help of the great body 
of literature to which the modern writer can appeal. 1 The 
theory, moreover, was then in its crudest form and not so free 
from careless generalizations as it is today. Green's language 
seems to be at times unsympathetic or even hostile toward the 
evolutionary method and results partly because we forget the 
distinction between early and more recent forms of evolutionary 
theory ; but largely because the reader does not understand what 
the questions exactly were that Green "put to himself and how 
he came to put them as he did." It is, therefore, fitting to 
begin with an examination of his problem and his method. 2 

The form as well as the content of Green's question resembles 
that of Kant, 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' 
Green declares that the primary question of metaphysics is, 
'How is knowledge possible?' In explanation he adds: "It is not 
to be confused with a question upon which metaphysicians are 
sometimes supposed to waste their time — ' Is knowledge possible?' 
. . . Metaphysic is no such superfluous labor. . . . It is simply 
the consideration of what is implied in the fact of our knowing or 
coming to know a world, or, conversely, in the fact of there being a 
world for us to know." z He believes, moreover, that this is the 
universal problem of metaphysics, common not only to the 
German Idealists, but to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He com- 
plains that the English philosophers of his day, unlike Kant, had 
been unable to read the "movement of speculation, which issued 
in Hume's Treatise" 4 with an understanding mind; so that, 
instead of "putting the metaphysical problem in its true and 
distinctive form," they had lost it outright and were even con- 
gratulating themselves on being "wise enough to drop meta- 
physics betimes and occupy themselves with psychology." 5 

1 He recognized in evolutionary theory a "valuable formulation of our knowledge 
of animal life," but he also saw clearly that it was not fitted for "the explanation of 
knowledge." I, 385. 

2 Cf. Edward Caird, " Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge," Queen's Quarterly, 
XII, 105. 

3 1, 374. Italics mine. 
4 1. 375- 

6 Ibid. What he understood by psychology and why he rejected the psycho- 
logical method will appear as we proceed. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 3 

In an age which was flooded with 'scientific facts' from all 
sides and in which the sciences seemed to be vying with each 
other in gathering data, Green did not hope to discover any new 
fact. Science was everywhere asking, 'What are the facts?'; 
he was asking, ' What is a fact? ' For the rational statement of 
his problem it was by no means necessary that the deliverances 
of physics, or biology, or psychology should be true, but merely 
that they should claim to be true. His interest, like Kant's, was 
to discover the rational basis of science or knowledge ; and toward 
the understanding of this problem the specific results of any 
particular science could contribute but little. The matter of 
first importance for Green was not to prove or disprove this or 
that scientific law, but to show that scientific law is possible only 
on certain assumptions regarding the nature of reality in general. 
In keeping with this he seldom or never questions the results of 
science as such. 1 He was wise enough to accept its results as 
infinitely better than any a priori guesswork of philosophers and 
theologians. 2 Science, however, is totally distinct from phi- * 
losophy, in this: it "takes for granted just what metaphysic, as a 
theory of knowledge, seeks to explain." 3 The question at issue 
between metaphysic and a science should not be looked upon as 
one "between two coordinate sciences, as if a theory of the 



human body were claiming also to be a theory of the human soul, 
and the theory of the soul were resisting the aggression. The 
question is, whether the conceptions which all the departmental 
sciences alike presuppose shall have an account given of them 
or no." 4 

In opposition to the tendencies of his own day to treat psy- 
chology as a universal science which could answer all questions, 
Green lays great emphasis on the distinction between meta- 
physics and psychology. The problem of all critical philosophy 
is to search out the foundations of knowledge, whereas psy- 

(^To be sure he protested against advancing the results of science in answer to 
metaphysical or ethical questions. 

■ Cf. I, 384 f. 

8 1, 164. Green always treats psychology as one of the sciences and consequently 
refers to it along with others in the quotation. Cf. I, 373. 

* I. 164. 



4 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

chology deals with the facts of individual psychic experience. 
Psychology can hardly be said to raise general questions of 
I validity and much less to answer them. The psychologist treats 
mind as his field of investigation in much the same way as the 
botanist deals with plants. Both seek facts which may be 
observed and tabulated, without being in the least concerned to 
know what the existence of facts implies regarding the nature of 
the whole of reality. 1 Green did not question the facts of 
psychology (which he understood to be concerned with the 
phenomena of the mental life) any more than he questioned the 
facts of biology; for his was a further question concerning the 
presuppositions of any science which deals with facts. He does 
not, for instance, suppose that the teaching of "our best psycho- 
logists" that the knowledge we possess "results from the pro- 
duction of feeling in us by the external world" is false. 2 It is 
especially noteworthy that he does not attempt to show that 
knowledge has had a miraculous birth or to dispute its relation 
to the animal organism and the physical order. The following 
quotation will make clear his position on this point: "If the 
alternative really lay between experience and ready-made unac- 
countable intuition as sources of knowledge; if the point in dis- 
pute were whether theories about nature should be tested merely 
by logical consistency or experimentally verified — whether sub- 
jective beliefs should be put in the place of objective facts, or 
brought into correspondence with them — the experientialists 
would be entitled to all the self-confidence which they show. 
That the question does not so stand, they can scarcely be ex- 
pected to admit till their opponents constrain them to it; and 
in England hitherto, whether from want of penetration or under 
the influence of a theological arriere pensee, their opponents have 
virtually put the antithesis in the form which yields the experi- 

1 See Green's distinction between Kant's problem and that of psychology, I, 
384. The literature on the meaning of Kant's problem is far too extensive and 
well known to require citations here, but it may be worth while to refer to two 
characteristic illustrations of it. Andrew Seth, "Philosophy as Criticism of 
Categories," found in the volume, Essays in Philosophical Criticism, edited by 
Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (1883); Edw. Caird, The Critical Philosophy of 
Kant, Vol. I, Chapter 1. 

2 I, 376. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 5 

entialists such an easy triumph. Both sides are in fact beating 
the air till they meet upon the question, What constitutes the 
experience which it is agreed is to us the sole conveyance of 
knowledge? What do we mean by a fact? In what lies the 
objectivity of the objective world?" 1 

In spite of the care which Green has taken to distinguish his 
question from that of the sciences in general and from that of 
the science of psychology in particular there has been a singular 
confusion regarding the nature of his problem. The real ques- 
tion, What are the implications of the possibility of knowledge? 
is taken to mean, What are the psychological facts of my indi- 
vidual consciousness? 2 As a consequence of this misappre- 
hension of his problem some of Green's critics persist in an 
attempt to convict him of wrong conclusions regarding the latter 
question, although we have no evidence that he undertook or 
cared to answer it. It is quite surprising to find a recent writer 
begin his criticism by classing Green as one of the "modern 
psychologists." 3 Nor is this mistake confined, as might be 
supposed, to those who reject Green's general conclusions. Mr. 
W. H. Fairbrother, a sympathetic and enthusiastic interpreter of 
Green's philosophy, has fallen into the same strange misrepre- 
sentation of its problem and method. He declares that the 
"two primary questions" of Green's metaphysics are, "What 
are the facts of my own individual consciousness?" and, "What 
is the simplest explanation I can give of the origin of these facts? " 4 
It would be difficult to formulate two questions less repre- 
sentative of the spirit and purpose of Green, since he is neither 
directly interested in the facts of his own individual conscious- 
ness nor in the origin of those facts. 

"The basis of practice," writes one of Green's critics, "can 
hardly be disclosed by a study of cognition. Still less can this 
be looked for when knowledge is interpreted with neglect of its 

l l. 385. 

2 Considering the number of times that this distinction of questions has been 
made since the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason it ought to be uncalled 
for now in a discussion of critical idealism. That it is not uncalled for cannot 
better be illustrated than by these criticisms of Green. 

8 G. S. Fullerton, Psychological Review, Vol. IV, p. 8. 

* The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (1896), p. 14. 



6 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

dynamic and purposive implications." 1 Would the author of the 
Prolegomena to Ethics recognize his metaphysics when described 
as "a study of cognition?" This phrase taken by itself, would 
suggest that Green is supposed to be trying to found ethics on a 
psychological introspection of his own mind rather than upon a 
critical examination of the logical implications of knowledge. 
But the last sentence of the quotation quite clearly indicates 
the fundamental misinterpretation of Green's question upon 
which Mr. Stmt's criticism proceeds. In this, as in the general 
context, the critic seems tacitly to identify a study of cognition 
with an analysis of knowledge. And this becomes still more 
apparent when we read : "The idols that beset Green's philosophy 
are, . . . Intellectualism and Subjectivism." 2 Now the charge 
of intellectualism, although it is not directly concerned in the 
present discussion, is particularly inappropriate to Green's 
philosophy. A careful examination of the Prolegomena to Ethics 
will show that no writer in modern times has had a firmer grasp 
of the "dynamic and purposive implications of knowledge" 
than has Green. The charge of subjectivism, however, more 
clearly illustrates the almost total misapprehension of Green's 
problem and method. Mr. Sturt seems to believe that Green 
was trying to spin the world out of his own abstract subjective 
experience; but Green has actually forestalled this charge by his 
clear distinction between the psychological subject, with which 
he is not directly concerned, and the subject of knowledge, with 
which he is concerned. "It is important not to confuse the 
relation of subject and object," he writes, "with the relation of 
matter to the psychical organism. It is a common delusion that 
one sort of phenomena are 'subjective,' another 'objective.' 
In truth, 'mental phenomena' are just as objective as any, 
phenomena of matter just as subjective as any. If mind and 
matter = two orders of phenomena, they do not = subject and 
object, for subject and object are correlative factors of everything 
as known." 3 Here as elsewhere he insists that he is not con- 
cerned with the individual processes of knowing, but with "what 

1 Henry Sturt, Idoli Theatri (1906), p. 227. 

2 Ibid., p. 211. 

8 II, 181 (note). Cf. I, 387. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 7 

is implied in the fact of our knowing," or in the "fact of there 
being a world for us to know." Not only did he protest em- 
phatically against substituting subjective whims and fancies for 
objective facts, as will later appear in the discussion of conscious- 
ness, but he approached the whole problem of philosophy with a 
particularly strong aversion for a subjective method. Sub- 
jectivism, in whatever form it appeared, brought forth his 
determined opposition, but it was the subjectivism of the tradi- 
tional method of English philosophy upon which his attack was 
most persistent and effective. 

Other writers who do not explicitly label Green as a psycholo- 
gist, nevertheless, treat him as such. 1 The radical distinction 
which he makes between the problem of metaphysics and that 
of psychology seems to be forgotten. If the distinction is un- 
warranted the critic should devote himself to the task of showing 
that there are no intelligible questions beyond those which psy- 
chology raises; if it is warranted it should be maintained. The 
distinction in question may or may not be permanently valid. 
It is at least permanently significant in an account of Green's 
philosophy. The psychology of his day claimed to be one of the 
natural sciences and to have adopted the problems and methods 
of natural science. Green was willing that psychology should 
be accepted at its own estimate and persistently treated it in that 
light. As one of the natural sciences he believed that it could 
properly raise and answer questions of analysis, origin, or other 
relation. The question which Green raised, on the other hand, 
is consistently called metaphysical and is sharply and em- 
phatically differentiated from scientific problems in general and 
from psychological problems in particular. Effective criticism 
of Green's philosophy must be metaphysical and must at least 
discuss his statement of the problem of metaphysics. Since the 
only problem he tries to answer is a metaphysical one it is mani- 
festly unfair and unconvincing to treat him explicitly or im- 
plicitly as a psychologist. 

1 Cf. G. F. Stout's attempt to refute a phase of Green's metaphysics by intro- 
spective analysis, in Mind, N. S. IX, p. iff.; A. J. Balfour, Mind, IX, 86 ff.; 
A. E. Taylor, The Problem of Conduct, p. 71 ff. The content of these objections is 
not necessarily introduced here. I merely refer to them as fair examples of at- 
tempts to criticize Green from the psychological viewpoint. 



8 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

Green fully believed that the problem he had chosen was 
one common to all modern philosophy. In particular, he had 
satisfied himself that English empiricism had been groping after 
a statement of the same problem ; but he was equally certain that 
his method differed completely from that of his fellow country- 
men. The method which he attributed to them was the psycho- 
logical, by which he meant essentially what psychologists mean 
today by introspection. That the workings of the mind could 
be made an object of knowledge Green did not question. Psy- 
chology, he writes, has "a region where it is truly independent of 
metaphysical questions, . . . but this region . . . has definite 
limits." 1 On the other hand, the question confronting the meta- 
physician, and which the psychologists cannot evade, "concerns 
the object of knowledge, and must be answered before the subjec- 
tive process can be investigated." 2 The question, "What are the 
conditions implied in the existence of such an object?" demands 
an answer as a "necessary prolegomenon to all valid psychology." 3 

In the Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature the 
author takes great pains to point out the fallacy involved in 
attempting to solve a metaphysical problem by looking within 
one's 'own breast.' Locke's plan of looking within his own 
mind to see "how it wrought," however valuable for certain 
purposes, is quite inadequate as a method of metaphysics. 4 
Indeed, the whole of the Introduction might be looked upon as an 
attempt to show that Hume's scepticism was the necessary 
outcome of adopting this method of 'looking within.' 5 The 
weakness inherent in British empiricism was due, according to 
Green, not to the fact that it had asked the wrong questions, 
but that it had taken a hopeless method of answering them. 
There is, indeed, no contention more often advanced throughout 
his writings than that it is absolutely futile to try to answer an 
ultimate metaphysical question by appeal to particular facts. 
This general proposition applies as well in the case of psychical 

1 1, 375- 

2 1, 377. Marginal note. 

3 1,377- Cf. II, 2i. 

4C/. I, 170; I, 121; I, 375- 

6 1, 6. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 9 

facts as in the case of physical facts. No enumeration of the 
subjective facts of consciousness can explain the consciousness 
of facts, any more than an enumeration of objective facts can 
explain or unify the world. It is no answer to the question, How 
is experience of facts possible? to point out the facts of experi- 
ence. We inquire into the implications of the existence of fact 
and are presented with an alphabetical catalogue of facts. We 
ask for bread and receive a stone. 

The method which Green proposed to use was critical rather 
than empirical. That is, it was essentially the method of Kant; 
although Green objected to the use of the term 'transcendental,' 1 
probably because of the danger of being misunderstood. Kant's 
use of the term had justly laid him open to severe criticism. 
There is something in this terminology which smacks of the 
'extra-experiential,' and it was precisely this error which Green 
was seeking to avoid. His object was to discover an immanent 
principle of organization within experience, not a world of 
'things by themselves' beyond it. Kant sought the a priori 
conditions of experience ; Green the logical implications of experi- 
ence. The difference in terminology, however, should not blind 
us to the similarity of the two methods. Both philosophers are 
really interested in getting beyond the mere immediacy of a 
given experience to what Kant would call a 'synthetic judg- 
ment.' How shall we have any significant judgment unless we 
can, in some sense, get beyond a mere 'given'? This question 
came to both Kant and Green with great force; but on the other 
hand, it is now safe to say that neither Kant nor Green was 
really hunting for that chimera — a super-experiential reality. 2 
Green was well aware that Kant's world of ' things by them- 
selves' was an impossible and absurd abstraction, but he believed 
that such a world was not the necessary result of the Kantian 
method. The world of bare things was a mere aberration due 
to the formal way in which Kant conceived the mind, not the 

* H. Sidgwick, Mind, N. S.. X, 18 f. 

1 Unless we understand experience in its narrowest psychological significance. 
Cf. "Mr. Lewes' Account of Experience," Green's Works, I, 442 ff. The "only 
valid idealism " is defined in this essay as " that idealism which trusts, not to a guess 
about what is beyond experience, but to analysis of what is within it." Ibid., 449. 



10 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

essential outcome of the critical method. Indeed, so far is this 
from being the true outcome, that it is to the critical method alone 
that we must look for the correction of the fallacy involved. 
Kant, as Green thought, had discovered the only possible basis 
from which the real futility of a search for a world beyond 
possible experience could be shown. Green, therefore, accepted 
Kant's attempt to analyze experience or knowledge as a final 
statement of the method of philosophy; but it was this very 
method which led him to abandon 'things-in-themselves,' 
together with Kant's formal schema of the categories and 
faculties. Before we can proceed to Green's analysis, however, 
we must seek an answer to the question, What did he mean by 
the experience which he proposes to examine? 

It is doubtful whether any philosopher ever imagined himself 
to be dealing with anything else but experience, yet the word is 
subject to most extravagant and ambiguous use. 1 The issue 
became especially clouded when the British philosophers took 
the word as a shiboleth of true philosophy and as mark of dis- 
tinction from continental thought, which was falsely supposed 
to be dealing with some other world. But as Green says, "It is 
not those, we know, who cry Lord, Lord! the loudest, that 
enter into the kingdom of heaven, nor does the strongest asser- 
tion of our dependence on experience imply a true insight into 
its nature." 2 Any experience which is to yield knowledge "must 
not be merely an experience in the sense in which, for instance, 
a plant might be said to experience a succession of atmospheric 
or chemical changes, or in which we ourselves pass through a 
definite physical experience during sleep or in respect of the 
numberless events which affect us but of which we are not aware. 
Such an experience may no doubt gradually alter to any extent 
the mode in which the physical organism reacts upon the stimulus. 
It may be the condition of its becoming organic to intellectual 
processes, but between it and experience of the kind which is to 
yield a knowledge of nature there is a chasm which no one, 
except by confusion of speech, has attempted to fill. Or to 
speak more precisely, between the two senses of experience there 

1 Cf. R. B. C. Johnson, Princeton Studies, Vol. I, No. 3, p. 10. 

2 I, 291. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. II 

is all the difference that exists between change and consciousness 
of change. Experience of the latter kind must be experience of 
matters of fact recognized as such. . . . For this reason an 
intelligent experience, or experience as the source of knowledge, 
can neither be constituted by events of which it is the experience, 
nor be a product of them." 1 Passages of this kind, which are 
not uncommon in Green's writings, help to throw light on the 
question, How is experience possible? He means significant 
experience, that is, "matters of fact recognized as such." The 
experience, therefore, of which Green is seeking a rational 
account, is conscious or intelligent experience; but conscious 
experience is experience of an object by a subject. Such an 
experience, not constituted by feelings (psychical events) but by 
judgments, 2 and therefore, necessarily involving subject and 
object, is the kind of experience in which "the object has no real 
existence apart from the subject any more than the subject apart 
from the object." 3 

While this definition of experience in terms of the subject- 
object complex does not distinguish Green from other idealistic 
philosophers, his method of analyzing the complex is more 
peculiarly his own. Although he believes that a careful examina- 
tion of either one of these two distinguishable but inseparable 
factors within experience would necessarily involve and reveal 
the nature of the other, he prefers to begin by a study of the 
object. "A theory of consciousness, to be worth anything," he 
says, "must rest on an examination of objects." 4 This point is 
of the utmost importance and is a distinguishing characteristic 
of Green's idealism. In a suggestive review of John Caird's 
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, which Green wrote a 
little less than two years before his death, he states his objection 
to Hegelianism in unambiguous language. Admitting that 
Hegel's conclusion is "the last word of philosophy," 5 he still 
feels much dissatisfied with the method which Hegel used in 

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, sections 15, 16. 

■ Cf. I, 448. 

3 1, 522. Cf. I, 141. 

«I. 483. Cf. 1,377; II. 21. 

6 III. 141. 



12 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

obtaining it. He has an " uneasy sense that it is little likely to 
carry conviction." "When we think out the problem left by 
previous inquirers," he continues, "we find ourselves led to it 
[i. e., Hegel's doctrine] by an intellectual necessity; but on 
reflection we become aware that we are Hegelian, so to speak, 
with only a fraction of our thoughts — on the Sundays of specu- 
lation, not on the weekdays of ordinary thought." 1 He con- 
cludes that Hegel's results need to be "put in a form which 
will command some general acceptance," for "we suspect that 
all along Hegel's method has stood in the way of an acceptance 
of his conclusion, because he, at any rate, seemed to arrive at his 
conclusion as to the spirituality of the world, not by interrogating 
the world, but by interrogating his own thoughts" 2 

Green constantly shows throughout his writing that he prefers 
to begin in an objective fashion with an examination of the object 
of knowledge. Even in the Prolegomena to Ethics, where he 
would be most expected to interrogate the subject rather than 
the world, nearly half of the first book is given up to a discussion 
of the 'Spiritual Principle in Nature,' which is essentially an 
examination of the objective phase of experience. We must not 
be misled by the phrase ' Spiritual Principle ' into supposing that 
Green is treating nature as even quasi-subjective. 3 Nature 
means for him the world of phenomena, that is, the objective 
aspect of experience; and the spiritual principle refers merely 
to the necessary interrelation and organization of the objective 
world, through which each thing is limited and constituted by 
all others — through which the objective world is a cosmos 
Nevertheless, this characteristic bias of Green's method is easily 
overlooked if we confine our study solely or largely to the ethics. 
For, inasmuch as ethics deals with persons, it is quite natural 
that the emphasis should there be given to the subjective aspect 
of experience. Moreover, Green did not pretend to stop with 
an interrogation of the objective world, but only to begin with it. 
In order to understand the full value of his choice of method 

i Ibid. 

2 III, 146. Italics mine. 

3 For Green the opposite of 'natural' is not 'supernatural,' but 'spiritual'; 
'supernatural' being a "mere phrase to which no reality corresponds." Ill, 265. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 13 

it is, therefore, advisable to turn from the ethics, which was the 
culmination of his thought, to his earlier and more strictly 
logical writings. 

He who would grasp the full significance of Green's examination 
of the object must first of all totally abandon the Kantian 
'thing-in-itself,' and accept the obvious implications which such 
an abandonment carries with it. Foremost among these impli- 
cations is the doctrine that, since reality is composed of possible 
objects of experience, a true account of experience will also be a 
true account of reality. Or, to put the matter in less ambiguous 
terms, Green would say that true knowledge is knowledge of 
reality. As one writer puts it: ''Knowledge professes to be 
knowledge of reality ; and thus if we raise the question ' How is 
knowledge possible'? or even the sceptical question 'Is know- 
ledge possible at all?' we are ipso facto dealing with the question 
'What is reality — the only reality we can know or intelligently 
talk about?'" 1 We find this thesis in the writing of Green 
repeated in one way or another with tiresome iteration; but it 
is only fair to remember that it was not so generally accepted 
when Green wrote as it is now. The basis for such a conclusion 
was definitely laid in the Critique of Pure Reason, but it did not 
become explicit until the later idealists had disentangled the 
positive from the negative results of Kant's work. Strictly 
speaking it was not, perhaps, until Hegel that philosophy was 
consciously ready to abandon ' things-in-themselves ' and to look 
for an answer to its question within rather than beyond experi- 
ence. Green quotes Hume to the effect that "the double exist- 
ence of perceptions and objects is a gratuitous fiction of phil- 
osophers, of which vulgar thinking is entirely innocent," and 
remarks that Hume builded better than he knew; for although 
the statement is inconsistent with Hume's own principles, it is a 
true account of the intimate relation between thought and 
reality. 2 He declares that contradictions "under whatever 
disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality 
either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart 

1 D. G. Ritchie, Philosophical Review, III, 17. 

2 Cf. I, 261. 



14 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, 
and through thought individualized by the relations which 
constitute its community with the universe, is recognized as 
alone the real." 1 Earlier in the same essay we read: "Of the 
real as outside consciousness nothing can be said; and of that 
again within consciousness, which is supposed to represent it, 
nothing can be said." 2 

It is a common supposition that one or more qualities belong 
to the object in its own right, but that the others are added by 
the mind, and that when the latter are stripped off there still 
remains the unknown existence of the thing. Green's criticism 
of this view is clearly implied in his rejection of 'things-in- 
themselves' and in his thoroughgoing belief that all objects are 
objects of knowledge. Even if one could be credulous enough to 
accept the statement that things unknown are unrelated (on the 
authority of a speaker who belies his own words by forming a 
judgment about these hypothetical reals), one would still be 
puzzled to know or even to imagine what truth the statement 
could have or how it differed in the least from falsehood. Green 
is inclined to treat this contention as the uncertain attempt of 
careless thinking to state the ground for a distinction between 
truth and falsehood, but put in such a way that it conveys no 
meaning. But may we not at least suppose that there is such 
an unknown, unrelated thing corresponding to our idea even 
though we can know nothing about it? Probably Green would 
-admit that we may suppose anything we like, but, as he con- 
tends on another occasion, that which is a mere possibility does 
•not exist. 3 Locke, for instance, treats the supposition that 
"there is a mere body to correspond to the given idea, not, to be 
sure, as knowledge, but as "an assurance that deserves the 
name of knowledge." 4 Upon this distinction of Locke's between 
knowledge and assurance Green comments as follows: "To seek 
escape from this dilemma by calling the consciousness of the 

11 1, 141. 
*i, 71. 
'3 in, 221 ff. 

4 Quoted by Green (I, 48) from Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, 
Book IV, Chapter II, Sec. 14, and XI, 3. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 15 

agreement in question an assurance instead of knowledge is a 
mere verbal subterfuge. There can be no assurance of agree- 
ment between an idea and that which is no object of consciousness 
at all. If, however, existence is an object of consciousness, it 
can, according to Locke, be nothing but an idea, and the question 
as to the assurance of agreement is no less unmeaning than the 
question as to the knowledge of it. The raising of the question 
in fact, as Locke puts it, implies the impossibility of answering it. 
It cannot be raised with any significance, unless existence is 
external to and other than an idea. It cannot be answered unless 
existence is, or is given in, an object of consciousness, i. e., an 
idea." 1 

There is no place in Green's philosophy for speculations about 
what may be possible in some land of day dreams. The business 
of philosophy does not permit holiday excursions into the region 
of myth. The only objects with which speculation can deal are 
knowable objects, i. e., objects vitally connected with subjects. 
This is sure to suggest that all of Green's profession to deal first 
with the object was but a pretext to conceal his underlying 
subjectivism; for no sooner does he mention the object than he 
becomes involved in a discussion of thought. Does he not 
straightway give up his contention that a true theory of con- 
sciousness must be founded on an examination of the object by 
thus declaring that consciousness and its object can never be 
separated? This criticism may appear plausible at first sight; 
but upon closer scrutiny it turns out to be unjustified, since 
Green's assumption is one that lies at the root of all criticism. 
He simply articulates the presupposition of all theories of ob- 
jectivity, namely, that a proposal to deal with the object as a 
thing abiding alone is a suicidal method. His declaration means 
simply that the statements which he is about to make concerning 
the object are serious, and at least not hopeless, attempts to get 
at the real object, rather than empty guesses forever beyond 
verification. 

That all objects are objects of consciousness or knowledge is 
not synonymous with the claim that we can know nothing beyond 

1 1. 49- 



1 6 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

our states of consciousness, or, as Locke would say, that knowledge 
is concerned with 'the agreement and disagreement of our ideas.' 1 
Indeed, it is the very refutation of such a doctrine; for as Green 
puts it, "It is quite a tenable position to deny that an object 
is a state of consciousness, and yet to hold that only for a thinking 
consciousness has it any reality." 2 It would be just as true and 
just as false to maintain that we can know nothing which is not 
beyond our states of consciousness. Both of these extreme state- 
ments are false because each implies a fundamental separation 
between consciousness and its object. The truth is more nearly 
approached when we give up all such antitheses and cease to 
talk of the object as it is known as even implicitly opposed to 
the object as it is not known. We should content ourselves with 
a discussion of the object of knowledge — the only object there is. 
Indeed, the expression 'object of knowledge' is, for Green, re- 
dundant except in so far as it serves to exhibit the fallacy of the 
'thing-in-itself.' 

The conclusion thus far reached is that Green's philosophy is 
best understood when looked upon as a reaction against the classic 
British school of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. He objected to 
breaking experience up into atomic parts and dealing with those 
parts as independent reals. Such an abstract procedure resulted, 
he believed, in Hume's denial of the possibility of knowledge. 
It was this situation which led Kant to inquire "How is experi- 
ence possible?", and it was this situation modified by the results 
of Kant's work which was the point of departure for Green's 
speculation. The problem which Green undertook to solve 
closely resembles that of Kant; indeed, in form and substance 
the metaphysical questions of the two philosophers are identical. 3 

1 An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. IV, Ch. I, Sec. 2. 

2 I, 423. Cf. I, 141; II, 73, 212 ff. Contrast with this statement of Green's 
that of Alfred Barratt, one of his older contemporaries at Oxford: "Thus we have 
seen from every point of view that all that we can know is ourselves, and that 
every hypothesis that we can frame is nothing but an extension of ourselves. 
Hence on the one hand, we perceive the futility of Metaphysics or Ontology, which 
is in truth nothing but an Agnoiology, a Non-Science of Ignorance." Physical 
Ethics (1869), p. 360. In this connection notice may also be taken of Bradley's 
statement that to be real is to be indissolubly one thing with sentience. Appear- 
ance and Reality (1893), p. 146. 

3 C/. D. G. Ritchie, Contemporary Review, LI, p. 843; also Mark Pattison, 
Memoir, p. 167. 



PROBLEM AND METHOD OF GREEN'S METAPHYSICS. 17 

There is, however, a considerable difference in their respective 
methods and results. The lapse of time between the publication 
of the Critique of Pure Reason and the middle of the nineteenth 
century had served to modify the formalism of Kant's critical 
procedure so that it had become at once more critical and more 
plastic. The non-essential parts of Kant's method, such as the 
separation of the phenomenal from the noumenal, the form from 
the matter of experience, and the rigid table of categories had 
been purged away. The essential method of searching out the 
principles of organization within experience remained, however, 
and was epitomized in the persistent question "How is experience 
possible?" Such a question, according to Green, does not 
involve a discussion as to whether or not experience is possible, 
nor yet a psychological account of the origin of experience by 
means of sensation or otherwise. By experience Green means 
"matters of fact recognized as such," and by an examination of 
such an experience he hoped to discover the constitution of 
reality through which experience is possible. In his examination 
he chose to begin in a purely objective fashion with a study of the 
object. He objected to beginning, as he believed Hegel had 
begun, with an examination of his own thought; but would in- 
stead inquire into the nature of thought's object. It is to be 
remembered, however, that he distinctly proposes to deal with 
thought's object; not with an hypothetical object, as it might be 
carelessly supposed to exist, independent of thought. When 
Green abandoned the Kantian ' thing-in-itself ' he gave up, once 
and for all time, the hope of getting outside of experience to a 
realm of independent reals untouched by thought. Such a posi- 
tion is not, however, synonymous with the contention that we 
can know nothing beyond our states of consciousness; for states 
of consciousness themselves are objects of knowledge. The rela- 
tion of objects to psychic states and the relation of objects to 
knowledge are fundamentally different. All objects whatever 
are objects of knowledge. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 

Whether Green is discussing logic, ethics, politics, education, 
or religion one idea controls his thought. This idea is that our 
philosophical and social theory must be founded upon a broad 
and adequate notion of the individual. Green's life work may 
be properly characterized as an emphatic and sustained protest 
against the abstract particular, and an attempt to substitute for 
the particular the true notion of the individual. He probably 
did more than any one else in England to point out, what is now 
generally recognized, that the besetting sin of British phi- 
losophy was its tendency to treat experience as a sum of atomic 
parts. The often quoted remark that Hume failed to see the 
forest for the trees has fixed this criticism in the minds of many 
who do not know that it was Green who first had the patience-to 
work it out in detail. Yet it was largely through his efforts in 
defining the nature of the individual that British speculation was 
saved from being lost in the abyss of Hume's scepticism. 

Green particularly objected to the fallacy of the abstract 
particular as it was expressed in the logic and metaphysics of 
his generation. The theories of knowledge which had been 
developed in England had resulted, as Green believed, in a general 
denial of the possibility of knowledge. The reason for this out- 
come was to be sought in the philosophy of Locke, whose original 
assumptions Hume had but developed to their necessary con- 
clusion. If we start with unconnected 'bits of knowledge stuff' 
we shall never get beyond them, for no true account of knowledge 
can be given on the supposition that it originates in that which 
is not knowledge. Whatever metaphysics had survived the 
failure of a theory of knowledge had survived, as might be ex- 
pected, in a common-sense revolt against scepticism. At least 
the majority of those who rejected Hume were satisfied to base 
their objections on uncriticized metaphysical assumptions, the 

18 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 1 9 

very assumptions, in fact, from which scepticism had resulted. 
While they revolted at Hume's conclusions they were unwilling 
to abandon Hume's premises as found in Locke. Nor could any 
other result be hoped for until the movement from Locke to 
Hume should be reviewed by a critic with sufficient insight to 
detect and emphasize the fallacy of the abstract particular which 
formed the leading presupposition of that movement. The 
Kantian philosophy, to be sure, had offered the required criti- 
cism, but in such a form that England had, up to that time, 
received but little enlightenment from it. In addition to the 
foreign sound of the critical philosophy, its implicit criticism of 
Hume needed to be explicated before it could be of wide influence. 
However much a follower of Kant or Hegel Green may have 
been, it is quite certain that he was more able than either Kant 
or Hegel to interpret the success and failure of the English 
philosophy to the English people. He was firmly convinced that 
there was but one way to escape the tangle of scepticism and 
that that way consisted in recognizing the true nature of the 
individual, as an organic union of the universal and the particular; 
or, in terms of Hegel's philosophy, as the concrete universal. 
Therefore, Green's philosophy may properly be said to begin 
and end with a discussion of the nature of the individual. 1 

Although Green's treatment of the individual person is gen- 
erally regarded as the distinguishing mark of his philosophy, 
it is the culmination rather than the beginning of his thought. 
His conception of the human individual is founded on an ex- 
haustive and labored criticism of the individual, as such. The 
charge, so often made, that Green reaches his conclusions about 
man and God per saltum carries greatest conviction to those who 
have neglected the more subtle passages in his works for the 
more readable. In the present chapter an attempt will be made 
to set forth his treatment of the individual as an object and thus 
to lay bare the logical foundation upon which rests his later, and 
perhaps more attractive treatment of personality. 

1 This may account for the fact that Green gave no systematic treatment of 
the categories. He has been blamed for neglecting this (cf. A. Eastwood, Mind, 
XVI, 243 ff.; H. Haldar, Philosophical Review, III, 172 ff.; R. B. C. Johnson, 
Princeton Studies, I, 3, 18); but what category is there which is not involved in a 
discussion of the individual? 



20 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

Probably everyone will admit on reflection that each object 
as we know it is related to other objects. And the more we study 
the object the more complicated and far-reaching do its relations 
become. Objects are related most obviously to each other in 
space and time, but there are also relations of origin and decay 
and the still more subtle relations of function or reciprocity. 
Each object is not only connected with other objects, but it is 
ultimately connected in some sense with all other objects in the 
varied process of the universe. So much is a commonplace of 
philosophy, though chiefly commonplace because it is not carried 
out to its full logical significance, but is taken simply to mean 
that reality is composed of a great number of particulars, in their 
own nature unrelated, though connected with each other in an 
external fashion as sticks might be bound together with a cord. 
This idea of a mechanical relation is definitely opposed by 
Green since it seems to assume that things are there before they 
are related. In criticizing this conception of external relations 
he proposes to show that the unrelated does not exist in any 
sense whatever. Moreover, the latter statement must be taken 
as a simple, unmetaphorical truth. It admits of no qualification 
which would tend to destroy its radical character. Green's 
treatment of objectivity does not deserve attention because it is 
based upon the common observation that objects are related to 
each other, but because it results in the conclusion that the rela- 
tions are internal to the object, that is to say, that the relations 
constitute the object. 

Before proceeding to Green's exposition of this radical thesis, 
however, it is necessary to dispose of the general objection 
that things must be there to relate before they can be related. 1 
The implication is that Green's language reveals a subtle self- 
contradiction, that all his talk of relations would carry no 
weight unless he surreptitiously introduced the conception of 
something beside the relations, namely, that which is related. 
The objection seems based on a misunderstanding of the force of 
Green's argument, since it assumes that existence is not a rela- 
tion; which is the very point at issue. In the words of William 

1 Cf. A. J. Balfour, Mind, IX, 80 f. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 21 

Wallace: "The refuter does not take unrelated in all its bitter 
truth, its absoluteness and utterness: he still leaves it in its com- 
parative sense, indicating the absence of those relations without 
which the being may still exist and perform its function." 1 
In the case of any given relation there is no doubt that we do 
refer to end terms, more or less properly known as the things 
which are related; but Green's contention is significant just at 
this point, for the things which are related, when further ex- 
amined, turn out to be themselves made up of relations. 

The "Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature'' is 
essentially a protest against an account of experience in quasi- 
physical or mechanical terms. Here Green enters into an 
exhaustive criticism of the foundations of British idealism, 
exposing with untiring zeal the inconsistencies of Locke's method, 
which had, as he believed, led to the objectionable results of 
Hume. Eight years earlier, however, in his essay on "The 
Philosophy of Aristotle," printed in the North British Review, 
Green had already clearly defined his protest against the abstract 
particular. In this essay the author is at his best both in style 
and subject matter, and the essay clearly reveals the influence 
which the study of Greek thought had upon his philosophy. 
He found Greek thinking kindred to his own and believed that he 
saw ample support in it for his own objection to the abstract 
universal as well as to the abstract particular. 

His contention that the unrelated does not exist is practically 
identical with the notion, which played so great a part in Greek 
philosophy, that the indeterminate is the same as non-being. 
This is a view, says Green, "which first finds distinct utterance 
in the dictum of Heraclitus, that objects of sense, as such, can- 
not be known. The sensible is the indeterminate (to aireipov), 
and the becoming (to y cyvo/ievov) ." 2 The "object of sense" as 
the indeterminate non-being is contrasted with the "object of 
knowledge," the determinate and related. 

Green constantly reveals his own view in expounding that of 
Aristotle. Adopting the above contrast between the "object of 

1 Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics (1898), p. 562. 

2 HI, 53- 



22 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

sense" and the "object of knowledge, " he agrees with the Greek 
notion that the object of sense can "only be described as that 
which is incapable of description, only determined as the inde- 
terminate, or, to take a figure from the sphere of art, it is a 
matter as yet without form; not, however, such a matter as the 
artist uses, already formed by the eternal Demiurge, but the 
negation of all form. In other words, it is nothing, for to be 
anything it must have a form of some kind." 1 On the other 
hand, the "object of knowledge" is capable of some sort of 
definition, it is, in fact, that which is related. "That which is 
known," he says, "must be susceptible of definition and descrip- 
tion. If I say that I have knowledge of this bed as an object of 
sense, and try to describe it, it appears that I do this by its 
properties. These, however, are not properly sensible but 
intelligible. . . . The attempt to know the sensible at once 
transmutes it into the intelligible." 2 

In as much as Green is irrevocably committed to a treatment 
of the object of knowledge, or, to use his own suggestive phrase, 
of "matters of fact recognized as such," 3 his interest in what he 
here designates the object of sense must be looked upon as a 
means to an end. The object of sense in being absolutely unde- 
termined does not really exist. When we attempt to think away 
the properties or relations of the object of knowledge we find 
that just at the point where definition becomes impossible, the 
object, properly speaking, ceases to exist — vanishes into the 
limbus of indetermination, and thus becomes non-being. "If 
we take as the germ of intelligent experience," he writes, "the 
simple consciousness of a sensation, this can only be expressed 
as the judgment, 'something is here.' The 'here,' however, is 
the next moment a 'there'; the one sensation is superseded by 
another." 4 Without distinctions the object is not possible. 
The positive result, therefore, of Green's criticism of the 'object 
of sense' is the conviction that the real object, the 'object of 
knowledge,' is the limited, the defined, and that if we suppose 

1 III. 54- 

2 Ibid. 

3 Prolegomena, sec. 16. 

4 III. 52. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 23 

all definition, i. e., all properties, absent, nothing remains. But 
the properties are relations to other objects. The most abstract 
object possible for us to deal with is at least a 'this,' and is there- 
fore distinguished from some other object — it is named. To put 
the matter in Green's single sentence; "The object of knowledge 
and the true reality coincide." 1 Objectivity is through and 
through ideal or intelligible, i. e., it is made up of relations. 

This conclusion, however, is to be carefully distinguished from 
those theories which tend to reduce the objective world to 'states 
of consciousness,' or, as the saying is, to consider the object as 
but a mere idea in the mind. In this matter Green agrees wholly 
with the words of Bosanquet: "'The Sun' means 'the Sun'; 
and whatever that may be, it is not anything merely in my mind; 
not relative purely to me as a conscious organism ; not a psychical 
fact in my individual history." 2 He had not the slightest notion 
of identifying himself with any idealism of the subjective type, 
indeed, his theory is fundamentally opposed to such an idealism. 
He objects first of all to the phrase "mere idea " because it is based 
upon a false antithesis between the real and the work of the mind 
— a distinction which gained currency through the 'new way of 
ideas ' which from Locke onwards assumes that nothing is known 
except the order and connection of ideas within the mind. The 
very statement postulates a world of reality beyond our states 
of consciousness but would destroy all hope of coming into 
contact with it. Thomas Reid has well expressed the natural 
objection to this theory which limits our knowledge to the order 
and connection of our ideas, in the following language: "If 
this be true; supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist 
presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the 
existence of any thing else; my impressions and ideas are the 
only existences of which I can have any knowledge or concep- 
tion ; and they are such fleeting and transitory beings, that they 
can have no existence at all, any longer than I am conscious of 
them. So that, upon this hypothesis, the whole universe about 
me, bodies and spirits, sun, moon, stars, and earth, friends and 

nil, 54. 

2 Logic (second edition), I, 73. 



24 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN, 

relations, all things without exception, which I imagined to have 
a permanent existence whether I thought of them or not, vanish 
at once; 

And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, 
Leave not a track behind." 1 

This protest voiced by Scottish philosophy was an open 
expression of a general dissatisfaction with British idealistic 
theory. Such a theory was well calculated to bring about a 
stout resistance from those who were apprehensive lest solid, 
objective facts should disappear into subjective whim. That 
such a resistance, however blind at first, was a just one was 
amply demonstrated in the course of the development from 
Locke to Hume. Locke had, to be sure, awkwardly tried to re- 
tain a grasp on the solid world by his famous distinction between 
the primary and secondary qualities of objects; but little by little 
the distinction had fallen of its own weight since it could not 
possibly be harmonized with his own more fundamental theory 
of knowledge. Berkeley with remorseless logic showed that the 
primary qualities could be reduced to the same terms with the 
secondary; that extension, for instance, no more truly existed 
within the object itself beyond our idea than does color or odor. 

Berkeley's criticism was, however, unsatisfactory to the sober 
thinking of England because it had apparently destroyed the 
antithesis by transmuting the primary into the secondary quali- 
ties. In doing so Berkeley had kept the Lockean distinction in 
all its essentials; for in his hands all qualities became just what a 
part of them were for Locke. Instead of rising above the ab- 
straction to a conception of the concrete relation of thought and 
its object, he had chosen the extreme which seemed to him 
furthest removed from the 'mathematical atheism,' which he so 
much desired to refute, and reduced the other extreme to it. 
"With Locke," says Green, "it was body or matter, as proxi- 
mately, though in subordination to the Divine Will, the im- 
printer of those most lively ideas which we cannot make for 
ourselves. His followers insisted on the proximate, while they* 
ignored the ultimate, reference. Hence, as Berkeley conceived, 

1 An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (third 
edition, Dublin, 1779), pp. v-vi; (Stewart edition, 1813), Vol. I, p. 168. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 25 

their Atheism, which he could cut from under their feet by the 
simple plan of eliminating the proximate reference altogether, 
and thus showing that God, not matter, is the immediate im- 
printer of ideas on the senses and the suggester of such ideas of 
imagination as the ideas of sense, in virtue of habitual associa- 
tion, constantly introduce." 1 The result of such a method was 
that matter became for Berkeley "a fiction" except in so far as 
its qualities "can be reduced to simple feelings." 2 "But in the 
hurry of theological advocacy," Green continues, "and under 
the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish 
this true proposition — there is nothing real apart from thought — 
from this false one, its virtual contradictory — there is nothing 
other than feeling." 3 

At this point Green is diametrically opposed to Berkeleyean 
idealism as he understood it. The formula esse est per dpi seemed 
to him to be a declaration that there is nothing other than feeling^ 
i. e., nothing beyond conscious states, and this he tells us is the 
virtual contradictory of his own theory that there is nothing 
real apart from thought. From such language it is evident 
then that Green had no intention of reducing the world of 
objects to the fleeting shadows of ideas or psychic states by the 
declaration that the unrelated does not exist. The object is just 
as real as thought, but neither is real apart from the other. 
They are to be conceived "as together in essential correlation 
constituting the real." 4 Indeed, far from making the object 
unreal, its relation to thought is precisely that in which its reality 
consists, since it, like everything else, is real in its connection 
with other things and not by being somehow opposed to the 
unreal. 

The antithesis between the real and the work of the mind is 

invalid, not necessarily because the real is the work of the 

mind, but, as Green says, "because the work of the mind is 

real." 5 "Either the work of the mind," he says, "is a name for 

l l. 139. 
2 1, 135. 

■I, 140, 141. Cf. II, 212 flf. 

•i. 141. 

5 Prolegomena, sec. 24. 



26 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

nothing, expressing a mere privation or indeterminateness, a 
mere absence of qualities — in which case nothing is conveyed by 
the proposition which opposes the real or anything else to it: 
or, on the other hand, if it has qualities and relations of its own, 
then it is just as real as anything else.'" 1 But even if we were to 
admit, for the sake of the argument, that the work of the mind is 
unreal, it would then be clearly impossible to assign any meaning 
to its opposite, a supposed real; for, in the words of Green, 
"Whether we suppose it the quality of a mere sensation, as such, 
or of mere body, as such, we find that we are unawares defining 
it by relations which are themselves the work of the mind, and 
that after abstraction of these nothing remains to give the anti- 
thesis to the work of the mind any meaning." 2 If we try to 
consider the mere sensation as the real we must admit that 
such a "reality is in perpetual process of disappearing into the 
unreality of thought. No point can be fixed either in the flux of 
time or in the imaginary process from without to within the mind, 
on the one side of which can be placed real existence, on the other 
the mere idea." 3 

Green's definition of the real is well summed up in the above 
phrase as that which "has qualities and relations of its own." 
This is but the positive form of the statement that the unrelated 
does not exist. It is on this account that the question "What is 
real?" seems to Green to be a "futile one," for it can be answered 
only by saying 'everything is real,' since everything with which 
we have to do "has qualities and relations of its own." 4 It is 
therefore impossible to say 'this' is real, 'that' is unreal; for 
all designation is relation, and all relation is the mark of reality. 
The general question What is real? is, therefore, not complete. 
Before it can be understood and answered it must be changed so 
that it will have a content expressing a doubtful relation. I may 
ask of myself or another whether a given relation which I have 
assumed is really as I have assumed. Such a question can be 
answered in turn only by reference to other relations. But the 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 22. My italics. 

2 I. 93. 
3 1, 70. 

4 Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 24. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 27 

question, in general, is as barren as any proposed by the School- 
men; it simply conveys no meaning and would not be supposed 
to do so were it not for the fact that the mind adds enough to the 
bare statement to make it determinate. We unhesitatingly 
interpret the question in its individual context and taking the 
will for the words we answer it as best we can. By the general 
question the speaker usually intends to inquire for a distinction 
between objective fact and subjective fancy; but real and unreal 
are not equivalent to fact and fancy. Every thoroughgoing 
philosophy must attempt some distinction between the latter 
pair, but to start with a distinction between the former is to 
make philosophy impossible. 1 

Green devotes a great deal of attention to the distinction 
between fact and fancy. As we noted in Chapter I, he actually 
considers the question "What is a fact?" a fundamental one for 
metaphysic. 'Fact' for Green is virtually synonymous with 
'object,' and his treatment of the object cannot be considered 
apart from his treatment of the nature of a fact. At first thought 
it may seem fanciful to identify fact and object, but when we 
remember that the object is the object of knowledge we get a 
glimpse of the identity. The characteristic features of the object 
and the characteristic arguments in Green's treatment of it 
will be found also in a discussion of the 'fact.' Like the object, 
the fact never stands alone in bare abstraction, but is constituted 
by its relations to other facts. Philosophy has to face the 
problem of the unrelated particular here just as it did in the case 
of objects. The common opinion seems to be that facts exist 
somehow as unyielding static things, and that the mind collects 
them and strings them together by attaching one to another in 
an external fashion. Facts are variously spoken of as 'immedi- 
ate,' as 'given in sensation,' or, we are bidden to settle our dis- 
putes by observing the facts just as we have been told to compare 
our idea with its object in order to test the truth or adequacy of 
the idea. Facts are supposed to be the ' raw material ' of knowl- 
edge, in their own peculiar nature quite without form or mean- 
ing, in short, quite unideal. No sooner do we get rid of the 

1 Cf. I, 268. 



28 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

unrelated thing beyond knowledge than it appears again, this 
time within knowledge, as the unmeaning fact or datum out of 
which knowledge is supposed to arise. Green is more hostile, 
if possible, to the latter contention than he was to the former. 

"The unscientific man," says Green, "if asked what an acid is, 
will say, perhaps, that it is that which sets his teeth on edge," 1 
thus revealing an essentially correct apprehension of the fact 
as a relation. If the 'unscientific man' is pressed, however, he 
will perhaps resort to the hypothesis that the facts are given and 
the relations added by the mind. This position is not peculiar, 
indeed, to the unscientific man. Much philosophical discussion 
has been founded on just this supposed difference in kind between 
fact and theory. That bare, crude facts exist prior to con- 
nection and interpretation is, perhaps, a more subtle error than 
that the thing is there before it is related; for here at least we 
do not propose to describe that which, by hypothesis, we have 
placed beyond the reach of description. Our datum is admittedly 
a datum within experience, but it is looked upon simply as a 
datum, a mere unmediated particular, an atom of knowledge. 
This fallacy is harder to refute because it is more widely held by 
all classes of people, and therefore more deeply entrenched in 
language and custom. Even the most sophisticated science 
speaks of collecting its data before it begins to interpret and of 
getting the 'facts before theories.' 

"Every kind of fact," says Bradley, "must possess these two 
sides of existence and content, . . . But there is a class of facts 
which possess another and additional third side. They have a 
"meaning" 2 Against such a view Green opposes the contention 
that there are no facts without meaning. It is the very nature 
of a fact to be in an intelligible relation, in the form of judgment, 

1 in. 53- 

2 Principles of Logic (1883), p. 3. Italics mine. There is no doubt that passages 
may be found in Bradley which are in general harmony with the views advanced 
toy Green; e. g., "there exists a notion that ideality is something outside of facts, 
something imported into them, or imposed as a sort of layer above them; and we 
talk as if facts, when let alone, were in no sense ideal. But any such notion is 
illusory." {Appearance and Reality, p. 165.) Even here, however, the context 
leads the reader to conclude that the author is not firmly convinced of the truth of 
his own statement. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 29 

and thus to have a meaning. "Mere sensation," he writes, 
"is in truth a phrase that represents no reality. It is the result 
of a process of abstraction; but having got the phrase we give a 
confused meaning to it, we fill up the shell which our abstraction 
has left, by reintroducing the qualification which we assumed 
ourselves to have got rid of. We present the mere sensations 
to ourselves as determined by relation in a way that would be 
impossible in the absence of that connecting action which we 
assume to be absent in designating them mere sensations." 1 
If such a position is defensible it means that there can be no 
antithesis between "thought, as that in which we are active, and 
experience, as that in which we are simply receptive," for 
"thought appears as a factor in experience even in its remotest 
germs." 2 It also follows that knowledge is not a process of con- 
juring meaning out of crude facts or unmeaning data. Facts, 
like sensations, are, for him, already judgments. In short, the 
'mere datum of the senses,' the unpredicated particular, under 
whatever disguise, has no claim upon philosophy. It is but the 
result of inadequate thinking to suppose that facts exist prior to 
interpretation. 3 

Another reason which Green gives for rejecting the notion 
that facts are given as uninterpreted particulars is that such a 
view leads to wrong conclusions regarding the nature of thought. 
The 'general idea' comes to be regarded as the result of numerous 
repetitions in Hume's sense. Through sensation we are sup- 
posed to get the concrete facts, the function of thought being to 
supervene and strip off these attributes from the concrete, im- 
mediate experience, in order to ' recombine them ' in the form of 
the universal which thus becomes a sort of 'mutilated par- 
ticular.' 4 In his lectures on "The Logic of the Formal Logi- 
cians," delivered at Oxford in 1874-75, Green deals in a very 
significant way with this conception of the universal as the 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 46. 

2 III, 52. 

1 If there are animals which feel without thinking, their feelings are not facts 
for them but only for another. Green does not need to prove that there are no 
such animals but only that wherever there is knowledge there is something other 
than physiological processes. Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 48, also I, 142, 281, 282. 

*Cf. Ill, 48, 49- 



30 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

abstract remnant of once living particulars. "The process of 
abstraction," he says, "as ordinarily described (as beginning with 
complex attributes and leaving out attributes till the notion is 
reached which has the minimum of determination), if it really 
took place, would consist in moving backwards. It would be a 
donkey-race. The man who had gone least way in it would have 
the advantage, in respect of fulness and definiteness of thinking, 
of the man who had gone furthest." 1 He says elsewhere that 
thinking "is not a progress from the less to the more abstract, 
but from the less to the more determinate. ... If it separates 
one attribute from another, it is to make each not less but more 
definite in virtue of a new relation." 2 

These false notions concerning the nature of thought have 
been fostered and even promulgated by formal logic which, in 
Green's language, "is the science not of the method of knowledge 
(which implies relation to objects) , but of those ' forms of thought ' 
in conforming to which we think correctly, but in a way that 
contributes nothing to knowledge or truth." 3 This conception 
of logic appealed to the Schoolmen, for "they did not want a 
method of arriving at truth, nor a theory of what knowledge 
consists in. . . . What they did want was a method of evolving 
what was involved in conceded propositions of the faith. Nomi- 
nalism is the process by which scholastic logic destroys itself. 
It is the recognition of the fact that in its deductions from 
universals syllogistic logic was merely analysing the meaning 
of names. Hence the modern mind, in the effort to know the 
truth about nature itself, discards it." 4 Such a logic serves a 
purpose, for it has a value as a "practical though not as a specu- 
lative science." Attempts to raise it to the rank of a specula- 
tive science, as an examination of formal thought, have failed; 
for the ostensible result of pure thinking "is exactly the same 
as its beginning," and therefore represents no process of thought 
whatever. "So long as the judgment stood, 'all men are 
mortal,'" says Green, "there was some color for saying that in 

1 II, 192. 
2 in, 53. 
3 11, 159-60. 

«II, 161. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 31 

the judgment, 'some mortals are men,' there was a further act of 
thought: but put it as 'all men = some mortals,' and the con- 
version into 'some mortals = all men' loses all appearance of 
forming a further act of thought at all." 1 

With Locke, therefore, Green agrees that syllogistic or formal 
logic can yield "no instructive propositions." 2 If we are to have 
knowledge at all, inference must be possible, and in order that 
inference should be possible logic must be more than formal 
thinking. Formal logic has laid philosophy open to the charge 
of putting into its premises whatever it desires to produce in its 
conclusion. Philosophical method, however, is in no sense 
identical with that of formal logic. The latter is the victim of a 
deep seated fault which makes it absolutely incapable of dealing 
with real inference, and therefore, with real knowledge. The 
root of this weakness is of ancient origin. Green traces the diffi- 
culty to Aristotle's failure to recognize the true and complete 
force of the doctrine of the non-existence of the indeterminate. 

The error of Aristotelian logic is that of identifying the first 
determination of the 'sensible thing' by thought with its com- 
plete determination. Such a procedure leaves no room for the 
expansion of knowledge. The 'object of sense' is crystallized 
in a name, and logic becomes little better than a game wherein 
the words are counters or symbols of that which was once living 
reality but which is now lifeless abstraction. It represents the 
indolence of thought. There is a kind of inertia in all thinking 
which has perpetually to be overcome if thought is to be kept 
abreast of reality, and formal logic is an apotheosis of this 
indolence. It depends upon crystallized notions and rigid 
classes for its very existence. Having named a thing, the mind 
rests content. When this kind of logic is identified with thought 
it is easy to understand why protests are raised against the theory 
that thought is adequate to reality. But is thought limited to 
such a petty round of barren formalism? By no means, ac- 
cording to Green. Such thought is thought which dies in its 
infancy, or, to change the figure, is bound within arbitrary and 

1 II, 164. Cf. I, 21. 

2 1, 285. 



32 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

accidental limits and becomes dwarfed. Its first movement, 
he tells us, is its last so that it "is for ever retracing the first steps 
of its childhood, which are represented by terms in received use; 
that it is working a treadmill, which, when it fancies itself 
laboriously ascending, brings it back to the simple predication of 
being with which it really began." 1 

Green's language suggests a picture of formal logic as a kind of 
abortive thought, or as thought which had been blighted in its 
infancy. Moreover, this blight has vitiated the whole process 
of thought just as a morbid condition of an organism blights or 
destroys its entire function. The beginnings of formal logic 
are, indeed, normal. The first determination of the object of 
sense is "real and essential, as contrasted with the mere object 
of sense. It is determinate, and therefore something, while that 
was nothing. . . . But this determinate form is capable of 
infinitely numerous other determinations as it is brought into 
other relations. In other words, our first knowledge of a thing 
is not our ultimate knowledge of it; the first 'form' is not the 
final one; the mere universal is a shell to be filled up by par- 
ticular attributes." 2 Having thus once identified the essence 
with the first determination of the thing, logic becomes a barren 
formalism in which thought is but a process of ascending "from 
sensible things to forms, and from the lower, i. e., the less ab- 
stract and extensive forms, to the higher, i. e., the more abstract 
and extensive." 3 The 'sensible thing' has been crystallized into 
the class, and as such can only become the subject of judgments 
in which it is "brought under a class more extensive than itself, 
i. e., in which that is predicated of it which is already involved 
in it." "By such a process," he continues, "its emptiness be- 
comes yet more empty, and meanwhile the individual thing is 
asserting its independence. Instead of being regarded as that 
which becomes universal as soon as it is judged of or known, in 
virtue of the property under which it is known, it is connected 
with the universal as a thing with the class to which it belongs. 
In this position it is vain to deny its priority and independence. 

i III, 61. 

2 III, 56. 

3 III, 59. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE OBJECT. 33 

Thus individuals come to be regarded as one set of knowable 
things, universals another." 1 Such crude realism which is 
'virtually nominalism' holds the universal to be real "but it 
finds the universal simply in the meaning of a name." 2 "It 
makes its universal a class instead of a relation, and it takes as 
the essential attributes of the class those only which are con- 
noted by its name, i. e., the most superficial." 3 

In direct opposition to this entire scheme of the formal logi- 
cians Green holds that the universal aspect of the object is 
relation rather than class, and thinking is a progress "from the 
less to the more determinate" To begin with, the object is seen 
to be related, as it were, only at one point; but it later shows 
itself to be more and more related to each and every other 
object. To be an object at all is to be related, but the relation 
is at first only in germ. To the object at this stage we can 
apply only the predicate of existence. But although existence 
is the simplest and least determination, it is nevertheless a 
determination of the object and therefore, removed in toto ccelo 
from the object of sense, the indeterminate and the non-existent. 
At this low point of determination the object is nebulous, a mere 
'this.' It falls within a class but has this significance that it is 
big with possibilities. It is "capable of infinitely numerous other 
determinations as it is brought into other relations." 4 

We have now reached the following conclusions. The object 
is the object of knowledge and as such it "unites the two sides 
of individuality and universality in the same way" as thought 
does. "It is a centre of relations, which constitute its proper- 
ties. As differenced from all things else by the sum of these 
relations, it is individual, but to be so differenced from them all 
it must have an element in common with them. If it be said that 
it is individual, as momentarily presented to the sense, this 
very presentation can only be known or named, i. e., can only 
have any meaning, as one property or relation of the thing 
amongst others." 5 The object is at once, "the individual uni- 

1 in, 57. 2111,60. "Ill, 61. 4 in, 56. 

6 III, 65. Green has used 'individual' in this quotation in the loose sense of 
'particular.' The meaning is, however, unambiguous and need not be in the least 
confused with the technical use of the 'individual as the synthesis of the universal 
and the particular.' 



34 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

versalized through its particular relations or qualities" and 
"the universal individualized through its particularity." 1 This 
process of individualization is a real process in which existence 
becomes more and more determinate through relations. In this 
sense the object may be said to be eternally incomplete; it is an 
individual object not when it is securely coralled within a class 
but in proportion as its implicit nature has been explicated by 
this process of universalizing through relations. Such a theory 
"admits in the fullest measure," says Green, "that the individual 
thing is real, and an object of knowledge, but maintains that it 
is so only in virtue of a relation which is universal, and without 
which the thing would have no intelligible properties at all." 2 

1 in, 70. 

2 in, 60. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 

We have now reached a point from which we may proceed to 
an examination of Green's theory of consciousness which, as we 
have observed, rests on an examination of the object. The ob- 
ject has been exhibited as an individual, uniting particuliarity and 
universality through its relations in an objective order. A 
moment's reflection, however, will show that the term 'relation' 
is as yet unexplained. We have, so to speak, made use of the 
obvious fact of relations to portray the nature of objects, but 
have not yet inquired into the nature of relations as such. We 
have seen relations functioning in the world of objective things; 
but have not investigated the source of such relations. It is the 
purpose of this chapter to inquire into the character and impli- 
cations of the relation which necessarily plays so large a part in 
every definition of the object; and to show in this way that the 
subjective factor is really involved in objectivity. 1 

As long as the attention is fixed upon the object which is 
being defined by relations, i. e., upon the content of the defini- 
tion, we have no more need for a conscious subject than the 
astronomer who found no God when he swept the heavens with 
his telescope had for a God. Scientific theory is justly uncon- 
cerned with such a subject. But, on the other hand, philosophy 
cannot permanently escape the notion that a definition is some- 
how more than its content. It is by no means necessary to 
separate the form from the content, but it seems to be necessary 
to recognize that the content has a form. This recognition is a 
distinct step in the history of mental development. The child- 
like mind is always engulfed by the sheer objective reality, by 

1 Green's general contention that the object implies a subject is not based on 
the mere fact that subject and object are correlative terms. Such formal reasoning 
has been often used by philosophers, but Green is too well aware of the limitations 
of formal logic to rest his case on any such procedure. The implication with 
which he deals, as we shall soon discover, does not depend upon a superficial verbal 
definition of the object, but upon an examination of its inmost nature. 

35 



36 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

the meaning of its environment, without any apparent reflection 
upon the existence and nature of meaning itself. But upon a 
closer scrutiny it discovers that in finding its way about among 
other objects, and in dealing with them generally, it has always 
been concerned with meaning. Like Monsieur Jourdain when 
he discovered that he had been talking prose all his life, the mind 
discovers a deeper lying reality when it begins to reflect upon the 
meaning aspect of experience, although it has never known 
anything else but meaning. When the mind has once grasped 
the notion that the objective world is made up of relations, i. e. t 
that it is the very essence of the object to be related, it is but 
another step in the same direction to see that to be related is to 
have a meaning. 

But in meaning we have to do with a reality of a different order, 
so far unlike the objects of experience that it cannot be dis- 
cussed in terms appropriate to them. Objects of knowledge are 
in time and space, or they are connected in a causal series; but 
meaning is not related to objects as they are to each other. 
Although it is through these relations that objects exist and 
have a meaning, the meaning itself is unique. It is not, properly 
speaking, an object of knowledge at all, and yet it is never 
separated from objects of knowledge. If we define experience, as 
Green does, as "matters of fact recognized as such," we may 
perhaps say that in discussing objects we have to do with matters 
of fact recognized as such ; while in discussing meaning we are 
interested in matters of fact recognized as such. They are in- 
separable but very different moments of a single reality. 

The first step toward understanding the nature of meaning is 
to recognize that meaning and judgment are practically identical 
in Green's system, or that meaning is always meaning for some 
one and, therefore, in the form of judgment. Such an identi- 
fication is no doubt wholly dependent upon how judgment is to 
be defined or conceived. To begin with, a judgment must 
obviously be distinguished from a proposition. The latter may 
be defined as a meaning expressed in a conventional language; 
perhaps it must even be still more limited in form to a subject 
and predicate bound together by a copula. At any rate, we see 



THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 37 

at a glance that if judgment were to be so denned it would be a 
much narrower term than meaning; for meaning may be ex- 
pressed by a single word, a gesture, or even an inhibition of 
movement. 1 Therefore, while every proposition probably repre- 
sents a meaning, 2 it is not impossible that meaning may occur 
independently of propositions taken in this narrow sense. A 
judgment, on the contrary, is an act of knowledge which, regard- 
less of its form of expression, deals intimately with the very rela- 
tions which have been shown to constitute the objective order. 
To know, to judge, is first of all to apprehend a meaning. This 
brands every judgment, therefore, as an expression of meaning, 
and every meaning as a judgment. Like meaning, judgment is a 
distinctive characteristic, not of the merely objective phase of 
experience, but of concrete experience which has been defined as 
matters of fact recognized as such. Like meaning also it is not 
related to things as they are related to each other in terms of 
time, space, cause and effect, et cetera. Causality, for instance, 
is an intelligible relation, strictly adapted to the formation of 
judgment; but as an intelligible relation, it is neither the cause 
nor the effect of anything else. The same arguments apply in 
the case of space and time. Judgment is not another thing in 
space nor an event in time. In the judgment 'something is there 
now,' which is perhaps as abstract as any judgment, we immedi- 
ately note that 'there' is distinguished from 'here,' and 'now' 
from some other time, past, or future, or both. The judgment, 
however, is neither here nor there, now nor then, unless we 
identify the written or spoken words with the act of knowledge, 
which they emphatically are not. Judgment is rather the organic 
unity of differences; 3 the meaning of 'now' or of 'this.' We 
may, therefore, conclude that judgment is the meaning aspect of 
things, or, if we prefer it, that meaning is meaning for some- 
body, i. e., judgment. 

1 Perhaps it may be shown that meaning is sometimes merely apprehended but 
unexpressed. This is, however, a psychological rather than a logical problem. 

1 Not every proposition as given represents a meaning in the mind of the speaker 
or writer, but every intelligible group of words represents a meaning for somebody 
at some time. 

• On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the differences which are 
unified in the judgment remain as differences. No judgment can be formed 
which is not in this sense both universal and particular. 



38 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

Not only does meaning turn out to be the same as judgment ; 
but when we reconsider Green's conception of fact as that which 
has meaning we see at once that even a fact in this sense is already 
a judgment. The truth is that facts, 4ike judgments, are beyond 
the reach of the mechanical categories. No fact, as such, exists 
in space or time, and no fact is the cause of another fact. Facts 
exist only in experience, where in has no spatial significance. 
The world of facts is, therefore, the intelligible world. Space, 
time, and all the other categories are, no doubt, indispensible 
principles of intelligibility, but, as principles, are not related to 
intelligibility in a further hypothetical space and time, or in, any 
external fashion whatever. As judgment is, for Green, the 
true type of knowledge or experience, it can " neither be. consti- 
tuted by events of which it is the experience, nor be a producTof 
them." 1 But such a statement concerning judgment applies 
mutatis mutandis to all other terms which explicitly refer to the 
intelligible aspect of the universe. Meaning, judgment, fact, 
are neither things nor events, as such, but the intelligible nature 
of things and events. Green's actual treatment of judgment 
has, therefore, already been foreshadowed in his treatment of 
the object as relation and of facts as meaningful.. For this reason 
it will 'not be necessary to dwell upon the subject of judgment at 
length in this chapter, but only to emphasize certain views, 
touched upon in the preceeding chapters, from this slightly 
modified standpoint. 

First, judgment is the simplest component of knowledge. 
This view is exactly parallel to the theory noted above, that the 
unmeaning fact does not exist, and is diametrically opposed to 
the one commonly held that knowledge is built up out of sensa- 
tions, or in the language of Locke, out of 'simple ideas which we 
do not make for ourselves.' According to the latter theory, 
judgment is a "mechanical combination of parts which remain 
outside each other." 2 This is to make judgment and proposition 
virtually synonymous. Against all such theories Green opposes 
the view that "the simplest fact" of sense impression "is already 

1 Prolegomena, section 16. 

2 Bosanquet, Logic (second edition), I, 31. 



THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 39 

not a feeling but an explanation of a feeling." 1 Following 
Locke, British classical philosophy held firmly to the 'simple 
idea' which was supposed to be the "datum or material of the 
mind, upon which it performs certain operations as upon some- 
thing other than itself." 2 "The fact is," says Green, "that the 
simple idea with Locke, as the beginning of knowledge, is already 
at its minimum, the judgment, I have an idea different from other 
ideas, which I did not make for myself." 3 Here we have the 
keynote of Green's criticism of sensationalism. To be a sensa- 
tion means to be distinguished from other sensations. No con- 
sciousness could be built up out of a succession of present im- 
pressions unless the present were in some sense bound up with 
the past and the future. Green's own language is vigorous and 
conclusive': "If we take as the germ of intelligent experience the 
simple consciousness of a sensation, this can only be expressed 
as the judgment 'something is here.' The 'here,' however, is 
the next moment a ' there ' ; the one sensation is superseded by 
another." 4 The only datum of sense which can contribute in 
any way to knowledge is, therefore, already a judgment; or in 
other words, the judgment is the simplest element of knowledge. 
Secondly, judgment is a process of individualization, i. e., the 
process of combining unity and variety. Reference has already 
been made to the process of definition through which the object 
gets its individuality. But definition does not take place in 
abstraction from knowledge; on the contrary, it is only in and 
through knowledge that definitions arise. To define the object 
is to give it a content, not merely to name it. Even the most 
abstract definitions of formal logic reveal this essentially concrete 
characteristic. We may take, as an instance, the definition, 
'Gold is a yellow metal soluble in aqua regia,' in which we have 
given the traditional formal requirements of a definition — the 
genus and the differentia. It is to be noted, however, that Gold 
is not merely a name, as would be the case if we should say 
' Gold is Gold ' ; but in our definition Gold is arranged or given a 

»i, 282. 
2 1, 19. 

3 Ibid. 

4 III, 52. Quoted above, p. 22. 



40 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

place in a system of knowledge; it is set off from other things. 
This extreme case illustrates the principle that identity and differ- 
ence are indispensible to even the most unsatisfactory definition 
which can be called a definition at all. Indeed, the same thing 
may be discovered in the nebulous definitions which we give of 
our vaguest knowledge. 'A stalactite is a kind of stone,' or, 
1 Pumpernickel is a kind of bread ' may be taken as examples of 
the barest knowledge, but here the differentia, if not quite 
explicit, is, nevertheless, implied in the phrase 'a kind of,' so 
common in everyday speech. Now this process of individu- 
alization, or of giving content to objects, is in reality judgment, 
for in the same sense that definition individualizes the particular 
object through universal relations, judgment holds its terms 
together, but at the same time holds them apart, i. e., it deals 
with identity in difference. Green's rejection of the so-called 
equational logic, to which we have referred on a previous page, 
is based on the notion that judgment is a great deal more than an 
expression of identity; it must also express difference. In 
Green's own words, judgment " integrates just so far as it differ- 
entiates. Beginning with a simple assertion of being or identity 
with self, A is A , it goes on to bring A into relation to some other 
object, which in like manner has been arrested in its flux, .... 
This relation gives a contrast and difference. A is not B. But 
as not B it is something more than mere A . The difference has 
not taken something from it but added something to it. It has 
not become a fraction of what it was before but a fuller integer. 
It is no longer a bare unit, but a unity of differences, a center of 
manifold relations, a subject of properties. It is not an abstract 
universal, but it has an element of universality in virtue of which 
it can be brought into relation to all things else. Its universality 
is the condition of its particularization." 1 

This brings us to the third, and for the present purpose the 
most important, characteristic of judgment. Judgment is the 
germ of all knowledge, i. e., any judgment is capable of being 
developed further and further toward an ultimate system of 
knowledge. This is again exactly parallel with Green's conten- 

1 III, 63. 



THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 4* 

tion that the object is capable of infinitely numerous determina- 
tions. His belief that Aristotelian logic is wrong in identifying 
the first definition with complete definition is thus borne out by 
his own positive theory of the development of judgment. "The 
first act of thinking or knowing," he says, "is the judgment 
'something is,' and the predicate of this judgment, 'being,' or the 
simple relation which it expresses, becomes gradually a subject 
of more and more determinate properties, as in successive judg- 
ments it is brought into new relations." 1 This means that no 
judgment is self-sufficient; that it is never complete, but always 
in the process of becoming complete by breaking down or giving 
way to a further and more concrete judgment. This is, indeed, 
but the other side of his contention that the first definition of an 
object is not the final or complete one; but when it is stated in 
this form it is seen to be essentially identical with the theory 
commonly advanced that all judgments are hypothetical. 2 
Philosophy has practically abandoned the hope of the older 
rationalists that a single axiom or set of axioms could be found 
from which all other judgments may be deduced after the manner 
of Euclidean geometry. This general conviction, however, 
admits two very different interpretations. On the one hand, it 
leads to a relativism of the most indefensible variety. No 
sooner are some people convinced that there is no universal and 
necessary truth than they straightway conclude that there is no 
truth at all in the sense in which mankind has always believed 
in an objective truth. 

On the other hand, a belief in the hypothetical character of 
judgment may mean, as it usually does in logical discussion, 
merely that any given judgment is essentially finite and incom- 
plete. Such an interpretation, while holding to the doctrine of 
the relativity of knowledge, is a very different view from the one 
commonly called relativism. The former is a logical or critical 
methodology and leads deeper into the questions of philosophy; 
the latter is uncritical dogmatism which leads nowhere, except 

1 III, 60. The thought expressed in this passage is clearly similar to the general 
Hegelian notion of the process of dialectic. 

' Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Chapter XXIV, p. 361; Principles of 
Logic, Bk. I, Chapter II; Bosanquet, Logic (second edition), I, 88 ff., 238 ff. 



42 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN 

perhaps to its own destruction. No thoroughgoing thought can 
long remain ignorant of the far-reaching implications of the 
doctrine that every judgment is incomplete; for the hypothetical 
and categorical aspects of judgment can be neither permanently 
nor completely separated. They hang together in such a way 
that both must be recognized in any true account of knowledge. 
It is indeed the abstract separation of the two which has brought 
about the absurdities of extreme absolutism, on the one hand, 
and extreme relativism, on the other. Every hypothetical judg- 
ment, after all, is intimately connected with a categorical judg- 
ment, since it postulates something categorical regarding the 
nature of the whole of reality. This has been variously ex- 
pressed by saying that the ultimate subject of every judgment is 
reality, 1 or that every judgment claims validity. "All hypo- 
thetical judgment," says Bosanquet, "rests on a categorical 
basis. That is to say, all relativity rests on an absolute datum 
and all necessity on fact. . . . Individuality is in self -relation, 
Necessity is in external relation." 2 

Green fully agrees with the latter interpretation of the hypo- 
thetical nature of judgment. Eevery judgment is, indeed, in- 
complete and finite, but every judgment is also a judgment about 
the real nature of things. The 'if so — then so' gets its sig- 
nificance from its categorical reference to reality. While recog- 
nizing, therefore, that all given judgments are incomplete Green 
really gives his attention to the implication of such a doctrine. 
The implication is briefly this, that there is a nature of things, a 
reality back of every relativity, through which the relativity gets 
its meaning; that finitude, by its very nature, looks beyond 
itself to a completion of itself in the infinite. 3 In his philosophy 

1 Cf. Bosanquet, Logic, I, 71 ff., and Bradley, Principles of Logic, p. 365 ff. 

2 Logic, I, 241-242. See also I, 225. "We have self-relation, existence, or a 
categorical aspect, and external relation, necessity, or a hypothetical aspect." 

3 Bosanquet speaks in this connection of the self as a "finite-infinite being." 
Cf. The Value and Destiny of the Individual (1913). Although a later chapter will 
deal specifically with the relation of the finite and the infinite, attention may be 
called at this point to the direct bearing which Green's theory of the incomplete 
character of judgment must have upon his ultimate conception of God. Judgment 
is not only incomplete, but it is becoming more complete. Whatever Green's notion 
of God may prove to be, we may be quite sure that his God is to be found, if at 



THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 43 

the emphasis is frankly laid on the ideally complete system as a 
basis for the successive steps of the judging activity rather than 
upon the finite character of each of the successive steps. If he 
tends to emphasize the categorical basis of hypothetical judg- 
ments rather more than later writers do, it is chiefly because his 
interest is clearly with what Bosanquet has called "individuality 
as self -relation " rather than with "relativity as external 
relation." 

In the foregoing argument we have constantly observed 
Green's recourse to an explanatory principle other than the terms 
of the phenomenal series. How shall we conceive this principle? 
Regardless of the particular word which he uses, whether mean- 
ing, fact, relation, or judgment, he never fails to call attention 
to a phase of experience or a principle within experience which 
defies classification as one of the natural objects. We would go 
astray in thinking of this principle of relation or meaning as 
outside of, or beyond the series; but yet we are not permitted 
to identify it with any member of the series or with their sum. 
It is a principle of organization throughout the series. One fact 
does not exist for another, nor does the relation between the 
two exist for a third fact, nor yet for a fusion of the first two. 
The several facts exist together and yet they retain their sever- 
alty. When matters of fact are recognized as such, we have to do 
with a synthesis involving more than a sum, or mere aggregate 
of parts ; we do indeed have unity, but a unity in which the parts 
are organized. On the other hand, we have a variety in which 
unity is immanent. Such a unity in variety in the case of 
objects has been previously designated 'individuality' which 
at once suggests the possibility of applying the category of 
individuality to our concrete experience. Is it not probable that 
individuality characterizes experience as a whole just as it does 
the items of experience which we have examined? If we answer 
in the affirmative we must say that objects are not only indi- 
viduals through relation, but the experience of a world of objects, 

all, at the end of a series of judgments, progressively more and more concrete. It 
is to be kept steadily in mind that Green is fully committed to a conception of the 
infinite, or absolute, as the result of a process of greater and greater determination 
rather than as the outcome of a process of abstraction. 



44 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

i. e., the system of relations which we know, is itself an individual 
combining unity and variety. This is, in fact, the hypothesis 
upon which Green's further speculation proceeds. From now 
on we shall be concerned in tracing his attempt to deal with 
finite experience and eventually with the ideally complete experi- 
ence in terms of individuality. 

This individuality of experience is, moreover, uniformly 
treated as a principle, not as a thing. Green sometimes expresses 
this idea by saying that in experience, or reality, there is a 
'spiritual principle' which cannot be accounted for by a natural 
history. In dealing with concrete experience we leave the plane 
of things and strive for the plane of principles; for wherever we 
find facts or a distinction between truth and falsehood, i. e., 
wherever we have the function of judgment, Green believes that 
we may justly assume that we have to deal with a spiritual 
principle rather than with a natural thing. 

The spiritual principle, however, refers to no supernatural 
entity, or substance, or power of any kind, but is simply a way of 
designating the aspect of meaning or organization in what- 
soever is. Green's contention, therefore, that there is a spiritual 
principle in nature is only that nature to its remotest parts means 
something; there is no place for the unrelated, unmeaning thing- 
in-itself. No 'natural history' can be given of this spiritual 
principle in nature; for the immanent relation must be presup- 
posed as the condition of tracing its origin. His contention that 
there is a spiritual principle in knowledge is, again, simply that 
knowledge to its remotest element is meaningful, or in the form 
of judgment. There is no place for the unmeaning fact, the 
unmediated datum of sense. The particular in both cases is 
already, through meaning, more than a mere particular; it is, 
in fact, a universal particular — the individual, i. e. f the particular 
universalized through relations which constitute its individuality. 

With such a principle of organization we are familiar in what 
we know as our intelligence. Our consciousness is, so to speak, 
at the center of the individuality of experience. The relations, 
and the judgments expressive of them are focused in a self- 
conscious, intelligent subject. The whole rational, purposive 



THE IMPLICATIONS OF OBJECTIVITY. 45 

agent, the subject of these objects of experience is thus literally 
implied — folded up — in such objectivity. This is at once a 
unique and a new factor in the problem before us of getting at the 
nature of experience. "No one and no number of a series of 
related events," says Green, in emphatic summary, "can be the 
consciousness of the series as related." 1 

We have now shown that the relation which exists between 
objects is already meaning or judgment; it does not have to wait 
to be put into words. But judgment or relation is a reality of a 
unique character. Hitherto we have been dealing with objects 
related to one another; but when we consider the relation itself 
we find that the relation is not related as object to object. It is 
throughout the series, but not a member of the series. It is not 
a fact, but the meaning of fact. The meaning of fact, however, 
does not exist for another fact, nor for a sum of facts, but for a 
principle through which they are significant, i. e., through which 
they are facts. Such a principle has been tentatively identified 
with what we know as our intelligence — in a word, with con- 
sciousness in its broadest sense. It is this implied "conscious- 
ness of the series as related" which we have next to examine 
more in detail. 

1 Prolegomena, section 16. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 

In harmony with Green's plan to found the theory of con- 
sciousness upon an examination of objects, the discussion, up to 
this point, has been carried on as far as possible without reference 
to a theory of consciousness. Objectivity, however, has been 
shown to involve a principle of organization, not itself one of 
the objects, but that through which objects are possible. This 
principle of organization has also been tentatively identified with 
consciousness. The purpose of this chapter is to examine 
Green's conception of consciousness somewhat more in detail and 
especially to show how consciousness, as the subject of knowledge, 
is distinguished in his system from the objects of knowledge. 

There are two typical methods of dealing with consciousness. 
First, it may be treated as an inner being or ego, of the existence 
of which we are immediately certain. This view is typified by 
the Cartesian expression cogito ergo sum. Second, it may be 
treated as an object of knowledge, subject to observation and 
quasi-mechanical explanation. The second view is typified by 
the procedure of Locke, who believed that he could discover the 
mature of consciousness by 'looking within his own mind to see 
how it wrought.' Both of these extreme views are rejected by 
'Green, as we shall see in what immediately follows. In opposi- 
tion to the former, he holds that knowledge of consciousness, far 
'from being given to us intuitively as an immediate certainty, is 
arrived at only after a severe process of reflection, and the medi- 
ation of thought. In opposition to the latter, he holds that 
living consciousness is never an object but always the subject 
of knowledge. In support of the latter thesis he proposes to 
show that whenever consciousness is made an object of knowledge 
it is falsified ; that when it is explained in quasi-mechanical terms 
its spirit is gone, leaving only an empty husk behind. 1 

1 Compare with this Bergson's statement that psychology can never deal with 
the true moi qui dure. The ultimate self eludes the grasp of the categories appro- 

46 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 47 

Philosophies of the first type have taken various forms, but 
there are some general features common to all. They agree in 
treating the existence of the self as more certain than anything 
else. They are ready with Descartes to doubt the existence of 
all objects in the whole world but to hold to the existence of a 
doubter. 1 The self, or subject, thus obtained is a pure, somewhat 
mystical 'ego,' given to us, we are told, by a sort of immediate 
intuitition. By taking this intuitive self-knowledge as a starting 
point we are supposed to be able to deduce all other knowledge 
from it; it alone being the root of the tree of knowledge. 2 

We have already seen that Green distrusts such a philosophy, 3 
for it makes a wrong beginning which has laid idealism open to 
the charge of subjectivism. Common sense has fortunately 
refused to accept such a theory, because common sense is really 
much more immediately aware of objects than of a self. With- 
out the doubtful aid of a formal dialectic no man doubts the 
existence of an objective world, although many men remain 
strangely unaware of selfhood. 4 So far, it is safer to follow the 
lead of plain thinking. If either term is to be deduced we may 
more properly begin with the object than with the subject. 
No conscious being can be ignorant of an objective world; for 
consciousness is first of all concerned with content. On the other 
hand, although consciousness would be impossible without its 
subjective aspect, the subject is hidden, as it were, beneath the 
objective order. The consciousness of selfhood is the goal or 
result of thinking, rather than its beginning. We become aware 

priate to a space world of identities. Up to this point Bergson and Green are in 
direct agreement. They do not, however, agree in a positive characterization of 
consciousness. Bergson tends to place consciousness beyond thought and to treat 
it as an object of immediate intuition, while Green simply places it beyond this 
type of thinking, although not beyond all rational conception, as we shall point 
out below. 

1 Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution (Mitchell's translation, 1911), p. 1. 

2 The classic example of this position is, of course, found in Descartes. 

3 Cf. Chapter I. 

4 Cf. J. M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations (4th edition); also Royce, 
Studies in Good and Evil (1899), pp. 143 ff. Royce quotes Fichte's declaration 
that "Most men could be more easily brought to believe themselves a piece of 
lava in the moon than to regard themselves as a self," p. 148; James Ward, 
The Realm of Ends (1911), p. 128 ff. 



48 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

of it only after a certain stage in the development of knowledge 
has been reached. 

The other type of philosophy, of which Locke may be taken as 
a typical representative, looks upon consciousness as the subject 
matter of the science of psychology. From this point of view 
ideas are regarded as phenomena of consciousness, and con- 
sciousness itself, as an object of knowledge, 1 which may be de- 
scribed or otherwise dealt with as the purposes of the science 
dictate. For Locke the task of philosophy was compassed by 
looking within his own mind to see how it wrought. Hume 
later essayed the task of building a true "science of man" upon 
the basis of observed experience, to take the place of "any 
hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original quali- 
ties of human nature." 2 But the experience within which he 
proposes to confine his investigations turns out to be an experi- 
ence objectified, anatomized, in short, an object of knowledge 
rather than the concrete living reality of knowledge itself. 
"For to me it seems evident," writes Hume in the ' Introduction' 
to A Treatise of Human Nature, "that the essence of mind being 
equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be 
equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities 
otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the 
observation of those particular effects, which result from its differ- 
ent circumstances and situations." 3 The assumption of both 
Locke and Hume seems to be that if consciousness is to be known 
at all our knowledge of it must somehow be gained by what they 
term 'observation.' Hume contrasts the knowledge gained by 
observation which is to result in a 'science of man,' with the 
hypothetical or speculative knowledge of philosophers which 
results only in pretended knowledge of the ultimate qualities of 
human nature. Although Hume was doubtless right in rejecting 
the pretentious speculations of metaphysicians who gloried in the 
fact that their theories were uncontaminated by contact with 
experience, he certainly was wrong in supposing that observation 

1 Cf. Creative Evolution, p. i ff. Bergson's treatment of consciousness seems to 
illustrate both the intuitive and the psychological method. 

2 A Treatise of Human Nature (Selby-Bigge edition, 1896), p. xxi. 

3 A Treatise of Human Nature (Selby-Bigge edition, 1896), p. xxi. Italics mine. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 49 

and experiment could answer all the legitimate questions which 
arise regarding the nature of consciousness, or experience in 
general. 

There is a sense surely in which consciusness may become 
the object of knowledge, but there is also a sense in which the 
consciousness of objects is properly distinguished from the objects 
of consciousness. It always takes a consciousness to observe a 
consciousness, or in more technical language, there is a logical 
as well as a psychological aspect of consciousness. It is the 
logical question which interests Green. Admitting freely that 
consciousness may be an object of knowledge, he goes on to 
inquire about consciousness as the subject of knowledge. Psy- 
chology is certainly a worthy science, but there is a prior and more 
fundamental business for philosophy than the business of observ- 
ing and describing consciousness. Philosophers must relate 
consciousness to the universe which consciousness knows and in 
which it has the power of placing itself among its own objects. 
A metaphysic of consciousness is, therefore, just as much needed 
as a psychology of consciousness, and, for better or for worse, 
it does pretend "to discover the ultimate original qualities of 
human nature" which lie beyond the arbitrary limits of obser- 
vation implied in Hume's definition of experience, although not, 
of course, beyond experience more broadly conceived. The 
'consciousness' in which Green is interested, therefore, is not 
the self or consciousness with which psychology deals. Such a 
consciousness, by hypothesis, is, and remains, an object of 
knowledge: it is the being whom I know, rather than 'I* 
who know. Green most emphatically declares that he is not 
concerned with the 'phenomena of consciousness.' "The phe- 
nomena of matter, the phenomena of consciousness, the con- 
nection between the two sets of phenomena," he writes, "equally 
belong to an objective world, of which the objectivity is only 
possible for a subject." 1 He is concerned with the subject of 
knowledge, which, though not at first as apparent as the object, 
is later seen to be the very condition of the possibility of the 
objective world. The subject of knowledge is, he says, that 

1 1. 387. 



50 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

" which we do not know but are, and through which we know." 1 
This statement does not commit Green to any form of agnosticism 
regarding the nature of the self ; for the point which he is empha- 
sizing is that the self is not to be known as one object among 
others by means of the mechanical categories. In what sense 
it is known, and under what category, will best appear by an 
elimination of some of the categories which serve an excellent 
purpose in dealing with objects, but which show themselves to be 
inadequate whenever an attempt is made to apply them to the 
nature of the subject. 

"The dominant notion of the self in Locke," says Green, "is 
that of the inward substance, or 'substratum of ideas,' coordinate 
with the outward." 2 Here we have the very root of the Lockean 
philosophy, to the destruction of which Green set himself in the 
Introduction to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. "There are 
two propositions on which Locke is constantly insisting," he 
says, "one, that the object of his investigation is his own mind, 
the other, that his attitude toward this object is that of mere 
observation. He speaks of his own mind, it is to be noticed, 
just as he might of his own body. . . . He, just as much as the 
untutored Cartesian, regarded the ' minds ' of different men as so 
many different things." 3 The legitimate outcome of such a con- 
ception of the self is found in Hume's famous testimony: "For 
my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, 
I always stumble on some particular perception or other, . . . 
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and 
never can observe anything but the perception." 4 Any attempt 
such as Hume's is foredoomed to failure because it sets out in 
quest of that which is not to be found in heaven or earth, viz., 
a substance without attributes. But it is especially futile to 
search for consciousness under the form of substance; for it is 
through consciousness that substance gets whatever meaning 
it has. 

Regardless of the terms in which it may be defined, substance 

i in, 267. 

2 1, 108. 

3 1, 6. 

4 A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 252. Cf. p. 635. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 5* 

is sure to be conceived as a thing; if not in space, at least coordi- 
nate with things in space. It is something which excludes 
something else. Substances may be lined up in a row and num- 
bered or labeled by intelligence. Substance is clearly an object 
of knowledge, and no qualification of substance as 'thinking' 
can redeem it from its position as an object of knowledge to a 
position as a subject of knowledge. The subject of knowledge 
and the object of knowledge are as eternally distinct as the two 
ends of a stick are distinct. 1 A philosophy, therefore, which 
treats mind as an inner substance treats it merely as an object 
of knowledge. Mind, which constitutes both the inner and the 
outer, is, in the language of Green, "treated as itself the inner 
* substratum which it accustoms itself to suppose.' It thus 
becomes the creature of its own suppositions. Nor is this all. 
This, indeed, is no more than the fate which it must suffer at the 
hands of every philosopher who, in Kantian language, brings the 
source of the Categories under the Categories." 2 Even if an 
object could be supposed to know itself as a substance among 
other similar objects, the knowledge thereof would still remain 
something quite different from a substance. Or suppose we 
agree to treat the self as a thing which has a consciousness of 
objects, we do not in the least advance toward giving an account 
of the consciousness of which the self is thus made a bearer. 
Whether or not we are convinced that the self is a thing, we still 
face the ultimate fact of the consciousness of objects, and this 
consciousness itself refuses to be treated as a thing. However 
far we force the matter back, we are driven sooner or later to 
admit a definite and fundamental difference between objects and 
consciousness of objects. We discover, moreover, that nothing 
whatever is to be gained by the device of supposing a substance 
as a supporter or possessor of consciousness. Such a super- 
numerary has long been on the retired list in philosophical dis- 
cussion. We will therefore avoid pedantry by continuing to use 
1 consciousness ' and ' self ' as synonymous terms. 

1 Cf. Hegel's criticism of Spinoza's conception of substance and his estimate 
of the advance made by philosophy when it came to deal with 'subject.' Logic, 
translated by Wallace, sec. 151. 

2 I. no 



52 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

Any theory which looks upon the self as an inner substance 
is, moreover, destined to become involved in the false antithesis 
of an 'internal' and an 'external' world. These two worlds 
represent what we usually understand by the psychical and the 
physical. The so-called internal world is the world of subjective 
experience, psychic states, etc., while the external world is the 
world of space and matter. No one can deny that the psychical 
and the physical are properly distinguished, but what meaning 
can we attach to the epithets 'internal' and 'external'? We 
might as well call the one blue and the other red. This antithesis 
gets its force from our tendency to think of consciousness as an 
object of knowledge. But whenever psychic states are treated 
as objects of knowledge they are exactly coordinate with all 
other objects of knowledge and come under the same rubrics. 1 
The moment we pass, however, from mind as an object of know- 
ledge to mind as the subject of knowledge we must use different 
tactics. The subject of knowledge cannot be a thing or sub- 
stance. The so-called external world may, indeed, be external 
to the human body, inasmuch as the body also is in space; but 
how can it be external to the consciousness of externality? To 
speak of things as "outside the mind" is "nonsense," says 
Green. 2 

Space or extension is real as the "relation of mutual ex- 
ternality." 3 But the relation of 'mutual externality' is meaning, 
judgment, knowledge, and is, therefore, not inside or outside of 
anything. 4 It is quite appropriate to speak of a consciousness 
of space, but perfectly unmeaning to speak of a consciousness in 
space. ' Things ' unquestionably exist in space, but consciousness 

1 Much discussion of the relation of mind and body has never risen above the 
plane of weighing one object over against another. In such discussions there is a 
constant tendency to treat mind as an object of knowledge. (Cf. Bradley, Appear- 
ance and Reality, Chapter XXIII.) For this reason it is better to substitute 
Green's terms 'subject' and 'object' for 'mind' and 'body' of the older dispu- 
tations. 

2 II, 200 ; also I, 482, and Prolegomena, sections 60 and 64. 

3 1, 228; also II, 16. 

4 Cf. Prolegomena, sections 52 and 60. Cf. Bergson's statement: "To ask 
whether the universe exists only in our thought, or outside of our thought, is to 
put the problem in terms that are insoluble, even if we suppose them to be intel- 
ligible;" Matter and Memory (translated by Paul and Palmer, 191 1), p. 13. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 53 

as subject is not a 'thing.' Nothing is to be gained by such a 
confusion between thought and its object. They are eternally 
distinguished, although never separated, or separable. Their 
distinction, however, can not be put in quasi-spatial terms; one 
is not 'here,' the other 'there,' nor is one 'this' and the other 
'that.' Green has summed up his distinction between things 
and the consciousness of things in the following language: "A 
motion can only be a motion, or a configuration a configuration, 
for a subject to which every stage of the one, every part of the 
other, is equally present with the rest; and what is such a subject 
but conscious?" 1 

The attempt to conceive the mind as an inner substance fails, 
therefore, because it is an attempt to spatialize the meaning or 
knowledge of space. A corresponding error results from an 
attempt to place consciousness in time. As the older British 
philosophy had undertaken an account of the self in terms of 
substance, so the newer philosophy, that of Green's own time, 
was trying to conceive consciousness in terms of an event. Con- 
sciousness was to be explained by reference to events which 
preceded it. It was to take its place in the evolutionary series 
as one step in the progress. Against all this Green raises his 
characteristic protest: Consciousness cannot be a member of the 
series of events of which it is the consciousness. Phenomena are 
always in time, but meaning or the consciousness of phenomena 
is not a phenomenon. 2 Nothing in Green's philosophy has 
caused more perplexity than his contention that a 'natural 
history' of consciousness is impossible. 3 This has been taken as 
a denial of the general laws of biological evolution. While there 
is no real basis for such a supposition, it must be admitted that 
Green allows himself to use expressions which, if taken by them- 
selves, could be so interpreted. He distinctly declares, for 

1 I. 379- 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 57. 

1 By ' natural history ' Green referred to the kind of genetic account which 
seeks to place a phenomenon in a temporal series, to tell what preceded it, or when 
it arose in a larger history. Such a history may indeed be written about con- 
sciousness in so far as consciousness is a phenomenon, but it is altogether beside 
the mark or even impossible when we study consciousness as subject. 



54 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

instance, that man is not a part of nature. 1 That the spirit of 
such a declaration, however, transcends the letter is made 
perfectly evident by his qualification of the word 'man.' It is 
man "for whom there is a cosmos of experience" of whom no 
'natural history' can be written, or it is the "principle in man 
which knows nature" that is not to be looked upon as a 'part of 
nature.' When the matter is put in this way the contention that 
a 'natural history' of consciousness is impossible becomes not 
only defensible, but quite unquestionable or even commonplace. 
In whatever sense man is a member of the biological series man 
is a part of nature ; but there is a sense in which man is a knower 
of the series, a formulator of its laws, and it is in the latter sense 
that he is not "an event or the product of an event." Green's 
contention, that the knower is not in time, is preposterous if the 
' knower ' means the psychic individual 'who rides in a coach from 
Oxford to London,' but the 'knower' with which Green is con- 
cerned means nothing of the kind. The 'knower' means for 
him not only the logical or metaphyscial subject of knowledge; 
but it means that subject in its peculiar and single character of 
subjectivity. 

"There could be no such thing as time," says Green, plainly 
enough, "if there were not a self-consciousness which is not in 
time." 2 It must be remembered that 'self-consciousness' 
is not the man who rides in a coach, or who was born on a certain 
day. Each man is born, passes through certain changes, and 
dies. Such facts are not here in question. Nor are we discussing 
mere change as it occurs in psychic processes; but the question is, 
What is presupposed in the 'consciousness of change'? 3 It is 
the consciousness of change which he declares can "neither be 
constituted by events of which it is the experience, nor be a 
product of them." 4 In a similar argument he writes: "We may 
decide all the questions that have been debated between materi- 
alists and spiritualists as to the explanation of particular facts 
in favor of the former, but the possibility of explaining them at 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 5. 

2 Ibid., sec. 52. See also I, 128. 

3 Ibid., sec. 15 and 16. 

4 Ibid., sec. 16. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 55 

all will still remain to be explained. We shall still be logically 
bound to admit that in a man who can know a nature — for 
whom there is a ' cosmos of experience ' — there is a principle which 
is not natural and which cannot without a varepov irporepov be 
explained as we explain the facts of nature." 1 "That which 
happens," he says, "whether we reckon it an inward or an out- 
ward, a physical or a psychical event — and nothing but an event 
can, properly speaking, be observed — is as such in time. But 
the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true 
'punctum stans' (Locke, Essay II, Chap. XVII, sec. 16) it is 
the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such 
an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of 'fact,' it is 
not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts." 2 
In a similar connection he writes, "some suspicion may perhaps 
be created that a natural history of self-consciousness, and of the 
conceptions by which it makes the world its own, is impossible, 
since such a history must be of events, and self -consciousness is 
not reducible to a series of events." 3 "Should the question be 
still asked," says Nettleship, in his Memoir of Green, "If the 
self-consciousness implied in moral action is not derived from 
nature or circumstances, what then is its origin? the answer must 
be that it has no origin. ' It never began because it never was 
not. It is the condition of there being such a thing as beginning 
or end.'" 4 

Such statements are likely to excite suspicion in the minds 
of those who are accustomed to rely upon evolutionary explana- 
tion as the only valid and sufficient solution of human problems; 
and they appear especially objectionable when taken out of 
their context and allowed to stand as bald assertions. A more 
careful interpretation of Green's language and a more sympa- 
thetic appreciation of his spirit will, however, dispel these mis- 
understandings. The "eternal self" may not be such a fearful 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 9. "By calling the principle not natural," says Green, 
"we mean that it is neither included among the phenomena which through its 
presence to them form a nature, nor consists in their series, nor is itself determined 
by any of the relations which it constitutes among them." Prolegomena, sec. 54. 

2 1, 121. 

■ 1, 166. 

* III, cxxxiii. 



56 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

monster as some have imagined. In order to understand what 
Green had in mind we cannot insist too often that it is not the 
psychological self with which we have to do. This is of primary 
importance since Green's critics persistently fall into the error 
of treating him as a psychologist rather than as a metaphysician. 
He does not undertake to defend the existence of the eternal 
self by means of psychological introspection or by appeal to any 
data of consciousness whatever. His interest is to show that an 
eternal consciousness as the subject of knowledge is implied in 
the existence of objects. The facts of consciousness exist in time 
just as much for Green as they do for the psychologist. As 
events, the events of consciousness transpire just as really for 
Green's theory as they do for common-sense. His contention 
is simply and solely that the meaning of time, that is, the con- 
sciousness of time, is not an event. 

A representative criticism of Green which illustrates this 
psychological bias is to be found in Professor A. E. Taylor's 
The Problem of Conduct. The burden of Taylor's disagreement 
with Green is that ethics is not dependent on metaphysics as 
Green taught. Inasmuch as this question is not germane to our 
present purpose, we pass at once to the incidental criticism of 
Green's conception of the self. In opposition to Green, Taylor 
makes what he himself calls two "rather sweeping assertions.' 
They are: "(i) There is no such thing as the Eternal Self, in 
Green's sense of the term; (2) if there were such a thing as the 
Eternal Self, it would be of no value for the purposes of the 
student of Ethics." 1 Although both of the statements are indeed 
'rather sweeping,' if we were to emphasize the conspicuous word 
thing, we should have assertions with which Green himself would 
heartily agree. That this suggestion is not a mere cavil will 
appear as we proceed to a discussion of Mr. Taylor's strictures. 

"What Green intended to prove," he writes, "was, of course, 
that the individual consciousness of each of us, on one side at 
least, is something which is not a result of 'natural forces,' 
has not had a beginning in time nor in history, and consequently 
cannot be adequately described by the methods of 'natural' or 

1 The Problem of Conduct (1901), p. 65. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 57 

'empirical' science." So far, this passage gives an accurate 
statement of Green's purpose, but it is immediately followed by 
an interpretation much less satisfactory. Taylor seems to agree 
with Green that ethics cannot be based on 'physical' facts, but 
asks, "why may we not, . . . base our ethics in the main on 
the observed facts 1 of specifically human life?" 2 Simply, we must 
reply, because they are still observed facts, phenomena, which, 
according to Green, presuppose the ethical consciousness which 
is in question. The critic has lapsed into the old fallacy of treat- 
ing a metaphysical principle as a psychological phenomenon. It 
is a mistake to suppose that Green objected only to reducing 
consciousness to a series of 'physical' as opposed to 'psychical* 
facts. The empirical sciences, for him, are those sciences which 
deal with the world of objects by means of the generally recognized 
categories of science, psychology being included among them. 3 

Professor Taylor sums up Green's argument in the following 
language: "Subject and object are relative terms which mutually 
imply one another, and cannot exist independently of each other; 
matter and motion and the physical world are objects, ergo 
matter is not subject, and conversely the subject which knows, 
desires, etc., is not matter. From this result, which we have 
no desire to impugn, he goes straight to the further conclusion 
that each and every self or subject, not being a secondary product 
of physical forces, cannot have come into being, and cannot have 
a natural history." 4 Now, inasmuch as Green includes the 
'psychical' (meaning thereby the phenomena of consciousness) 
along with the 'physical' world as an object of knowledge, we 
must insert the word ' psychical ' into Mr. Taylor's second propo- 
sition so that it will read: 'matter and motion and the physical 
and psychical worlds are objects.' Having done this, the final 
conclusion, in the passage quoted, loses its apparent character 
of a non sequitur and becomes the only possible conclusion to be 
drawn. The implication of Professor Taylor's language is that 
Green did not take due account of the possibility of the self 

1 My italics. 

2 The Problem of Conduct, p. 66. 

1 Cf. Bosanquet, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1901-02), p. 36 ff. 
* The Problem of Conduct, pp. 68 and 69. My italics. 



58 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

being a product of psychical forces, whereas Green actually 
excludes such a possibility along with his denial that conscious- 
ness arises out of physical events. It is events, as such, which 
cannot account for the consciousness of them. Whether we 
choose to call those events physical or psychical is of no sig- 
nificance. 

"What evidence, then," continues the critic, "does Green 
supply that might lead us to affirm the underived character not 
merely of consciousness, but of the 'self? As far as I compre- 
hend his reasonings, all the evidence for this important transition 
is offered by the consideration that a series of related events can- 
not possibly become aware of itself as a related series." 1 Again, 
the reader might be satisfied with this interpretation, did the 
author not hasten to add the footnote: "This position itself 
needs more qualification than Green gives it before it can be 
accepted as psychologically true." The author confesses that 
he is unable, by introspection, to verify Green's contention. 
"But of course," he writes, "an opponent may say that this is 
due to defective observation." 2 This seems an altogether singular 
position for one who is familiar with Green's convincing argu- 
ments against Hume's attempt to find such a 'self by 'looking 
within his own mind.' This confusion between the self as a 
principle of unity in difference and the self as psychological and 
objective is at the root of this and of much misunderstanding of 
Green. The only reply to be made is the one made by D. G. 
Ritchie to Bradley's characterization of the 'timeless self as a 
" psychological monster." 3 The timeless self does not claim to 
be a psychological self, and Green protests against such an inter- 
pretation throughout his works. The timeless self is not the 
psychological self (which is by hypothesis in time, since it may 
be observed); but rather the knowing consciousness logically 
implied in the possibility of psychology. Such a self is not 
discovered by observation but by a rational disclosure of the 
nature of observation ; it is not a fact but the meaning of fact. 
The next step in Mr. Taylor's argument is that relative 

1 The Problem of Conduct, p. 70. 

2 Loc. cit., note 2. My italics. 

8 Philosophical Review, III, 28, 29. Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 113. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 59 

permanency of the self is all that is required to account for 
unity in diversity. "What is required," he says, "in order that 
the successive presentations A, B, C may all be recognized as 
experiences of the one soul or self d, is not that d itself shall stand 
in some mysterious way outside the time series, but simply that 
alongside of the transition A, B, C there shall remain elements 
in the experience of d which are the same at the moment when C 
is being experienced as when A was being experienced." 1 Here 
again the question is bound to arise — What can relative perma- 
nency, or 'change at a much less rapid rate' mean without the 
implicated consciousness for which such relative permanence is a 
fact? No point can be carried against Green's metaphysics 
by an appeal to psychological facts. They may be real and 
very important facts, but they are not relevant to the discussion. 
Our attention must be^fixed on the question, 'What is a fact?', 
not 'What are the facts?' The spiritual principle which 
Green has called 'consciousness' is, by hypothesis, the meaning 
of facts and events, and as such, it is not a fact or an event. 2 
Consciousness is a principle internal to events themselves by virtue 
of which they are constituted. Such a view of the nature of con- 
sciousness no more destroys the reality of time than a declaration 
of the non-spatial character of knowledge destroyed the reality 
of space in the former argument. It does, however, destroy the 
possibility of setting up time as an independent reality, or of 
making time serve as a universal category. Mind is the creator 
of time, not its creature. In whatever sense and degree con- 
sciousness knows a series of natural events, in that sense and to 
that degree it is not a member of the natural series. 

1 The Problem of Conduct, p. 72. 

2 From this it follows without argument that the subject is not to be conceived 
as that which existed prior to the beginning of events {Prolegomena, sec. 73), or 
as that which exists as an unmoving point outside of the series of events, in relation 
to which they move. Green's use of the expression 'punctum stans' is shown by 
the above quotation to be borrowed from Locke in an attempt to meet Locke on 
his own ground. It is not native to Green's thought. Cf. Bosanquet, Proceedings 
of the Aristotelian Society (1901-02), p. 39. "The first thing to remember seems 
to me to be that it [the punctum stans argument] does not at all stand alone, but 
that the main foundation of Green's argument is clearly and continually expressed 
in other terms, (e. g., Prolegomena, sections 36 and 83) referring to the nature of a 
true whole, and the progressive realization of such a whole in the human mind." 



60 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

Green not only refuses to think of the self in spatial or temporal 
terms, but, in a similar manner, he argues against applying the 
categories of cause and effect to the self. Cause is a principle of 
intelligibility whereby consciousness knows the world of objects. 
It applies to objects, but not to knowledge of objects. 1 "A 
proposition," says Green, "which asserts divine causation for 
any phenomenon is not exactly false, but turns out on strict 
analysis to be unmeaning." 2 It is unmeaning because God, 
when truly conceived as the spiritual principle in the world, is 
in no sense interpolated as the supernatural into an otherwise 
natural series of events. In exactly the same sense our conscious- 
ness does not cause its object nor does the object cause con- 
sciousness. 3 Numerous attempts have been made to show that 
consciousness is the effect of the interaction of organism and 
environment. All such attempts, according to Green, take 
certain relations between objects, "which only belong to them 
as being what consciousness has made them, to explain the fact 
of there being the consciousness to which they owe their existence. 
... A product of consciousness — or, to speak more precisely, 
a certain correlation of matter and organism belonging to the 
'universe which arises in consciousness,' or to that objective 
world to the existence of which it is admitted that a subject is 
necessary — is thus employed to account for the origin of con- 
sciousness." 4 Such a procedure, he continues, "can only remind 
us of Baron Munchausen's feat in swinging himself across a 
stream by the sleeve of his own coat." 5 

But enough has now been said of Green's treatment of the 
particular categories to prepare for his own positive conception 
of consciousness. We have seen that consciousness is not an 
object of knowledge in any ordinary sense. It is not a phe- 
nomenon in any sense of the word. It is not, therefore, related 
to objects as objects are related to each other. The categories 

1 Cf. Prolegomena, sections 16 and 17. 

* III, 264. 

8 " Intelligence, experience, knowledge, are no more a result of nature than 
nature of them." Prolegomena, sec. 36. 

* I, 482. 

6 1, 482, 483. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 6 1 

of the empirical sciences do not apply to the source of the cate- 
gories. "In vain," says M. Bergson in a slightly different con- 
text but in the same spirit, "we force the living into this or that 
one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are too narrow, 
above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them." 1 "The 
greatest writer," says Green, "must fall into confusions when he 
brings under the conceptions of cause and substance the self- 
conscious thought which is their source; and nothing else than 
this is involved in Locke's avowed enterprise of knowing that 
which renders knowledge possible as he might know any other 
object." 2 

So far, however, our conception of consciousness and its rela- 
tion to its object is negative. 'Of what value,' it may be asked, 
'is the proof for the reality of a mere principle which causes 
nothing, is nowhere, and about which no natural history can be 
written? Is it not a logical abstraction rather than real exist- 
ence?' Green raises the same objection and answers it in the 
following language: "To the rejoinder that implication in the 
conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer 
must be the question, What meaning has real existence, the anti- 
thesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this concep- 
tion?" 3 This summary, perhaps almost curt, reply to his critics 
should, by no means, lead us to suppose that Green was fully 
content to stop with a purely negative or formal characterization 
of the subject. His argument up to this point has been a means 
to an end. Little by little he has forced his reader to abandon 
the common habits of thinking about thought, or self-conscious- 
ness, as if it were an object of knowledge, and has brought him 
face to face with the subject of knowledge. By this method he 
has cleared the ground for a more adequate notion of the self 
as the subject related to the object through the unique, creative 
function of knowledge — it knows the object. 

The subject, so understood, although it can never be con- 
ceived in the ordinary terms, is not left as a vague, mystic ab- 

1 Creative Evolution (translated by Mitchell, 191 1), p. x. Cf. Ill, 228-229. 
2 1, 109. 
8 1, 129. 



62 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

straction about which nothing can be said. 1 On the contrary, 
it is arrived at by greater and greater determination through a 
process of mediating dialectic in which the mechanical categories 
are gradually shown to be inadequate and the nature of indi- 
viduality correspondingly revealed. Reflection, in its initial 
stages, showed that objects are individualized through the cate- 
gories. We are now ready to understand the positive nature of 
the subject, as the true individual, the true case of unity in 
variety. Speaking of objects, Green writes: "Abstract the 
many relations from the one thing, and there is nothing. They, 
being many, determine or constitute its definite unity. It is 
not the case that it first exists in its unity, and then is brought 
into various relations. Without the relations it would not exist 
at all. In like manner the one relation is a unity of the many 
things. They, in their manifold being, make the one relation. 
If these relations really exist, there is a real unity of the manifold, 
a real multiplicity of that which is one. But a plurality of things 
cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can a single thing 
of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations. It is true, as 
we have said, that the single things are nothing except as deter- 
mined by relations which are the negation of their singleness, but 
they do not therefore cease to be single things. Their common 
being is not something into which their several existences disap- 
pear. On the contrary, if they did not survive in their single- 
ness, there could be no relation between them — nothing but a 
blank featureless identity. There must, then, be something other 
than the manifold things themselves, which combines them 
without effacing their severalty. With such a combining agency 
we are familiar as our intelligence." 2 

Every intelligent experience does present this typical unity, 
combining the manifold things without effacing their severalty. 
The one category, therefore, which seems appropriate to con- 
sciousness is individuality. The same individuality which we 
discovered as the essential nature of judgment, the simplest form 

1 On this point Green is diametrically opposed to Bergson. Contrast the 
formula of Spinoza — determinatio negatio est. Epist. L. 

2 Prolegomena, sections 28 and 29. See also section 10 and Nettleship, Memoir, 
III, lxxvi. 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 63 

of knowledge, also characterizes knowledge in all its com- 
plexity as we find it in the experience of a long life. Indeed, the 
whole of knowledge is but an expansion of the judgment. In 
judgment we have a key to the nature of consciousness and also 
to its relation to the object. As the terms of the judgment do not 
exist independently, but only in and through the judgment; 
so the objects of consciousness do not exist independently, but 
only in and through consciousness. 

By the term 'consciousness' we here refer to the principle in 
man of which no natural history can be given, viz., his capacity 
or function of holding objects together in knowing them without 
effacing their severalty. The objects, as we pointed out above, 
exist only for consciousness and in that sense consciousness may 
be said to create them. This view of Green's, however, is to be 
sharply distinguished from that of Kant. 1 For Kant, the under- 
standing makes nature by forming that which is given as the 
matter of experience. For Green, in whatever sense the under- 
standing creates the form, it also creates the matter of experience. 
At this point Green leans more heavily on Aristotle than on 
Kant. Form and matter are not to be separated. We are not 
free to speak of the understanding as a kind of artisan who works 
up the material already at hand, for the material with which the 
artisan works is already formed. The understanding makes 
nature in making nature possible, but this function is not de- 
pendent upon having at hand a primeval clay out of which to 
mold its forms. To be is to be formed, to be related, or, in the 
language of Greek philosophy, the object of sense does not exist; 
to be is to be an "object of knowledge." Kant's idea is that 
without the understanding there would be a disordered world of 
things by themselves; Green's idea is that without the under- 
standing there would be no world at all. 

"Everything is obscure in the idea of creation," says Bergson, 
"if we think of things which are created and a thing which 
creates." 1 When we say that consciousness creates its object 
we are prone to form an image of consciousness working upon 

1 Prolegomena, sections 1 1 ff. 

2 Creative Evolution, p. 248. 



64 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

something — engaged, as it were, in its manufacture. But this 
imagery is all wrong. The creation of which Green speaks 
must be thought of in a very different way. The process of 
creating the object has already been described as a process of 
determination, leading from an abstract, relatively unformed 
thing to the highly developed concrete individual thing. In this 
sense creation is internal to the object. The object, in truth, 
develops itself; since the relations of its individuality are not 
imposed from without, but, developing from within, expose or 
bring out the true nature of the object. 

At other times Green speaks of the relation of consciousness 
to the object as that of parent to child. Consciousness can find 
its own life reproduced in its object. It knows, and, inasmuch 
as objectivity exists in and through the function of knowledge, 
consciousness may be said to be the father of the world. "But 
though the world of nature is, in this sense, a world of man's 
own creation, it is so in a different way from the world of art 
and of philosophy. Thought is indeed its parent, but thought 
in its primary stage fails to recognize it as its own, fails to trans- 
fer to it its own attributes of universality, and identity in 
difference. It sees outward objects merely in their diversity 
and isolation. It seeks to penetrate nature by endless dichotomy, 
glorying in that dissection of unity which is the abdication of 
its own prerogative." 1 

But whatever metaphor Green uses, the essential character 
of the self as a true unity in plurality and plurality in unity 
is what he is most concerned to show. Although the ordinary 
terms appropriate to the object of knowledge do not apply to 
the subject of knowledge, the self, or subject, is, nevertheless, 
like the object in that it unites universality and particularity in 
individuality. 2 Along with the similarity, however, there is this 
difference. The individuality of the object is not for itself, but 
only for the subject who individualizes it in knowing it, while 
the subject is an individual for itself. The subject, by this 
self-returning activity, does actually know itself, not, to be sure, 

1 III, 21-22. Cf. Prolegomena, sections io, n ff. 

2 C/. Seth, Man's Place in the Cosmos (1897), pp. 163-164. "The thing and 
its qualities is a mere analogue of the self as a many in one." 



THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE SUBJECT. 65 

1 

under the forms of space, time, causality, and the like, but as a 
unity in variety. It knows itself not as its own object, but as the 
necessary correlate of the fact that it has an object. It is driven 
home to itself from its contact with objectivity, and then for the 
first time knows itself as that above all which made its first 
experience possible. It sees itself not as an object, but as a 
creative individual subject. This view is, of course, by no 
means original with Green. Hegel has made such language 
famous when describing the subject. 1 He defines individuality 
as "the reflection-into-self of the specific characters of uni- 
versality and particularity." 2 In Green's language we call the 
subject a spiritual principle because "we are warranted in 
thinking of it as a self -distinguishing consciousness." 3 "There 
is nothing 'fiir sich bestehend' but thought itself." 4 

Green's critical work, says Professor Andrew Seth Pringle- 
Pattison, has a "victorious" and "conclusive" character, "but 
as regards the nature of the Self or Spiritual Principle which is, 
in his hands, the instrument of victory, the candid reader of 
Green is forced to admit that almost everything is left vague." 5 
It may readily be admitted that there is a kind of vagueness 
about Green's account, as there must be about any account, of a 
principle which is shown to be beyond the usual methods of 
thought. The epitome of Green's attempt to define the self 
is revealed in the question: "What is that which retains a 
plurality in its plurality, and yet unifies it through relation, but 
consciousness ? " 6 It is that unity in which diversity is immanent ; 
it is the true harmony of the universal and the particular, i. e. t 
the individual. Whatever vagueness there is in such an account 
of consciousness can be avoided only by a return to the plane of 
mechanism, where, waiving all ultimate questions, we abandon 
the hope of metaphysic. But if we would inquire into the nature 
of the subject we must use language applicable to its unique 

1 "The idea is truth in itself and for itself." Logic (Wallace), section 213. 

2 Ibid., section 163. 

8 Prolegomena, section 54. 

< II, 11, note 1. Cf. II, 211. 

6 Hegelianism and Personality (1887), p. 4. 

•II, 16 



66 , INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

character. Leaving the explanation of mechanism, we must go 
on to a conception of consciousness as in some sense the source 
of the mechanical relations. To him who can believe in the 
reality of those things only which his eyes have seen and his 
hands have handled, Green's talk of 'spiritual principles' will 
continue to be enigmatical. To such a one, consciousness must 
be put some place, or set in time, before it can claim reality; to 
say that consciousness is an individual, or a unity in plurality 
or a principle, is, so he thinks, to 'multiply words without 
knowledge.' But Green offers no concessions to such perverse 
scepticism. Like a teacher of old, when men say of consciousness, 
'Lo, here, or Lo, there,' Green warns us to believe them not; 
if we would find consciousness we must seek it in the way of 
the spirit. 1 

1 Cf. Mark, 13, 21. 



CHAPTER V. 

GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 

Our theory of consciousness is not complete until we have 
seen not only what consciousness is, but what it is to be. As 
objects have been found to exhibit different degrees of concrete- 
ness or individuality, so there are degrees of individuality in the 
subject. Although the simplest recognition of matters of fact 
is infinitely removed from bare particularity, consciousness, in 
its early stages, is relatively nebulous and undetermined. But 
as the object of knowledge points beyond itself to a complete 
system of nature, so the finite subject finds its significance by 
reference to a total situation beyond its limitations. We have 
seen that the object becomes more and more complete through 
successive stages of definition ; we have yet to trace the course of 
the finite subject through a similar development. The progress 
in each case is toward an ideal completion of individuality, but 
there is this fundamental difference: The ideal system of nature 
in which the object finds its complete definition exists not for 
the actual object of nature, but for man who conceives such a 
system; whereas, the ideally complete subject exists for the 
actual subject as his own self-conscious ideal. 

The individuality which I discover in my own experience is, 
after all, but a fragment. I am limited on all sides. Not only 
do I often miss the truth, but I always fall short of it; and yet I 
am not limited by an absolute boundary as an animal is con- 
fined in a cage. The limitation of human knowledge, which no 
one disputes and which requires no proof, is the limitation inher- 
ent in the nature of knowledge. Knowledge, as Green has so 
frequently suggested, has to do with a situation in which there 
is a certain disparity between that which is and that which is 
not yet. The guiding thread in the study of an object is the 
ideal of a complete account of the object in its total relation. 
It is the nature of an ideal to be beyond the present grasp, and 

67 



68 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

yet the ideal, as a functional part of experience, is equally present 
in experience with that which is already grasped. There is a 
sense, therefore, in which knowledge sets its own limits. It sets 
a goal ; approximates it, only to set another, and so on endlessly. 
Thus, although our knowledge is certainly finite, the limits are 
not fixed or imposed from without, but are incidental to the 
internal development of knowledge and are eternally being over- 
come. The finite mind, in knowing, exhibits itself as potentially 
infinite through this very process of setting up a limit and then 
of passing beyond its own limit. Our knowledge is never quite 
complete, but always finds its completion in a future judgment 
referring to that which lies beyond the present insight, or, in 
other words, to reality as a whole. No philosophy can ignore 
this forward-pointing characteristic of knowledge; since reality 
will never be adequately expressed in terms of finitude, and since 
what lies beyond our present grasp is, nevertheless, a very 
important aspect of the world and must be reckoned with. In 
what sense it is real and what relation it sustains with finite 
experience constitutes a fundamental problem for all types of 
metaphysical theory. Green faces this problem with confidence, 
although with great caution. 

It is first necessary to remember that all predication is based 
upon an assumption that there is a nature of things or a basal 
reality by reference to which all judgments get their meaning, 
and through which truth is distinguished from falsehood. What 
the reality beyond the present is, is not now in question. "The 
complete determination of an event," writes Green, "it may be 
impossible for our intelligence to arrive at. There may always 
remain unascertained conditions which may render the relation 
between an appearance and such conditions of it as we know, 
liable to change. But that there is an unalterable order of rela- 
tions, ... is the presupposition of all our enquiry into the 
real nature of appearances." 1 

We are justified in assuming the existence of such an objective 
totality 2 by reference to which our knowledge acquires validity 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 26. See also sec. 70. 

2 Mr. A. J. Balfour doubts this statement. Cf. Mind, IX, 83. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 69 

because the scepticism which would deny its existence destroys 
itself in the same breath by assuming some such reality as the 
basis for its denial. Any conclusion based on the assumption 
that there is such a dependable system of relations will not, 
therefore, be weakened by the suggestion that "the validity of 
our conclusion, upon our own showing, depends upon there really 
being such an order of nature as our quest of knowledge supposes 
there to be, which remains unproven." For, Green continues, 
"as the sceptic in order to give his language a meaning, must 
necessarily make the same supposition — as he can give no 
meaning to reality but the one explained — his suggestion that 
there really may not be such an order of nature is one that con- 
veys nothing at all." 1 

Inasmuch as all thought proceeds on the assumption of the 
verifiability of its claims, those who would think are compelled 
to assume also the reality of a total objective situation as a basis 
for such a verification. To deny the existence of such a universe 
is to affirm it. It is also necessary to believe that the process 
of verification of tomorrow will be similar to the one of today. 
No body of knowledge could exist unless nature is in some sense 
uniform and continuous. On these considerations, Green rests 
his conclusion that there must be some kind of an objective 
criterion of judgment, a reality which gives meaning to the claim 
of validity. 

This reality, however, to which our particular judgments are 
referred may be conceived in at least two very different ways. 
On the one hand, it may be conceived as a fixed reality outside 
of thought, to which our ideas correspond more or less accurately. 
Green unconditionally rejected this view. 2 Our ideas are in no 
sense copies of an alien reality; for a moment's reflection shows 
that ideas are included within reality. ' The work of the mind is 
real,' he tells us. If truth is to be defined as 'the agreement 
of thought with its object,' the definition must be reinterpreted. 
It can no longer take shelter behind a naive assumption that 
thought may somehow be superimposed upon its object and found 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 26. 
1 Cf. Chapter II. 



70 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

to match point by point. Another serious objection to this view 
is that reality is looked upon as a fixed quantum which admits of 
no essential change. Everything is there, once for all, in a 
static, substantial form. The dice are loaded so that what- 
ever happens must take place along preestablished lines: there 
is no room for actual change or freedom. 

On the other hand, reality may be looked upon as a total 
concatenation, coherent as human experience is coherent, but 
in its totality beyond the grasp of the finite mind. According 
to such a theory, truth may be said to depend upon the degree of 
individuality which any experience has attained, i. e., upon the 
degree to which the experience has transcended its fragmentary 
character and has become a systematization of otherwise abstract 
particulars. This is Green's conception of the nature of reality 
and truth. "Coherence . . . ," he writes, "is only predicable 
of a system of relations, not felt but conceived; while incoherence 
arises from the attempt of an imperfect intelligence to think an 
object under relations which cannot ultimately be held together 
in thought." 1 This theory maintains that the reality which lies 
beyond our present apprehension is of a piece with the reality 
which I know. All possible experience must somehow be uni- 
form with that already attained. The uniformity need not, 
however, be repetition; indeed it is never repetition, but there 
must be a certain consistency of relations throughout the whole. 
The relations themselves must be different, but they are still the 
same in being relations. The relations existing for the individual 
knower in the objective order are a guarantee of similar relations 
in the universe beyond his private experience. "The uniformity 
of nature," says Green, "does not mean that its constituents are 
everywhere the same, but that they are everywhere related; 
not that 'the thing which has been is that which shall be,' but 
that whatever occurs is determined by relation to all that has 
occurred, and contributes to determine all that will occur." 2 
The rational character of my world would be denied by a proof 
of the irrationality of the universe. Unless the individuality 

*l. 155. 

8 Prolegomena, sec. 33. Cf. sec. 73. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 71 

discoverable in finite experience is characteristic of the world as 
a whole, "we have asserted the unity of the world of our experi- 
ence only to transfer that world to a larger chaos." 1 

The first type of philosophy looks upon reality as a permanent 
substance more or less disconnected with knowledge; the second 
type looks upon it as a permanent system of relations, organically 
and vitally connected with knowledge. In spite of the external 
resemblance of the two accounts of objective reality there is 
really a very fundamental difference. In both cases the element 
of permanence is strongly emphasized, but in the first case the 
permanence is incompatable with change, in the second, change 
is a necessary and organic factor in the conception. According 
to the first notion, reality is a given object to which our ideas 
may be said to correspond. The idea is always external to 
reality and has nothing to do with its constitution. Change can 
be predicated, not of reality, but only of our thoughts concerning 
it. Reality, therefore, does not change; change is illusion, 
resulting from the false or incomplete representative character 
of our ideas. The second conception of being or reality, how- 
ever, is very different. In it we talk no more of substances, but 
of relations. Now a world of relations is above everything else 
a world of meanings, or of judgments, i. e., an intelligible world. 
When we return to Green's discussion of relations we recall 
that relations are not mere connecting links between substances, 
but that relations constitute the objective world of fact to its 
very core. There is nothing left over when relations are taken 
away. The 'facts,' therefore, of Green's system are spiritual 
or meaningful through and through, and, what is still more 
important, the facts or relations are ' capable of infinitely numer- 
ous other determinations as they are brought into new relations/ 
With these familiar doctrines kept well in mind we are at once 
able to see the tremendous difference between a reality defined 
in terms of things and substances and a reality defined in terms 
of meanings and relations. There is no such a thing in Green's 
philosophy as a fixed or static meaning, just as there is no such 
a thing as a complete and axiomatic judgment. When, therefore, 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 39. 



72 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

reality is defined as a permanent system of relations the perma- 
nent has no reference to a static reality, immobile and change- 
less, but permanent in just the same sense that any truth is 
permanent in spite of the fact that it is 'capable of infinitely 
numerous other determinations.' 

In view of the fact that the problem of change and develop- 
ment in Green's philosophy will later call for a somewhat more 
extended treatment, the matter may be allowed to rest for the 
present. It is to be noticed, however, that Green's attempt to 
define the nature of reality as a whole is put in the same terms 
which he used to describe the nature of each phase of experience 
with which he has dealt. Firmly convinced that finite experi- 
ence is a systematic or relational whole, he does not hesitate to 
characterize the world of possible experience beyond the present 
grasp of a finite mind, as also a world of relations, continuous with 
the cosmos of finite experience; not necessarily intelligible under 
the exact forms which the finite mind now uses, but necessarily 
intelligible, i. e., necessarily related to the present and char- 
acterized internally by relations. All experiences, actual or 
possible — "the experience of a thousand years ago and the 
experience of today, the experience which I have here and that 
which I might have in any other region of space," — must some- 
how form a single system. 1 

Having thus satisfied himself that there is an objective system 
of relations, Green proceeds to draw the conclusion that such a 
system implies a spiritual principle as the complete subject of 
that total system of objects. "The inference from nature," he 
writes, "to a being neither in time nor contingent but self- 
dependent and eternal, ... is valid because the conception of 
nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being." 2 
It will be observed that Green's argument for the existence of 
this self-dependent being is identical with the argument by which 
he proved the spiritual principle in knowledge. In neither case 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 32. 

2 I, 129. See also Prolegomena, sections 19 f. and 69. At this stage in the 
discussion it is probably unnecessary to remind the reader that the implication of 
which Green speaks is never a mere verbal or associational connection. God is 
implied in nature just as subject in general is implied in objectivity. Cf. Chap. III. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 73 

is the appeal made to an immediate or intuitive apprehension, 
but the spiritual principle is said to be implied in the natural or 
objective order. The spiritual is discovered in the natural. 1 
He has no hesitancy in arguing from a permanent system of 
relations to the existence of a spiritual principle, which he con- 
sistently calls God, implied in those relations. " That God is," 
he says, "it [human reason] entitles us to say with the same 
certainty as that the world is or that we ourselves are. What he 
is, it does not indeed enable us to say in the same way in which 
we make propositions about matters of fact." 2 

It is peculiarly unsatisfying to stop with the bare assertion, 
or proof, of God's existence, if this is to rest as the mere asser- 
tion of the undefined. In the language of Edward Caird: 
"There is a fundamental incoherence in a view which, though 
treating the infinite as a positive reality, and, indeed, as the 
reality that underlies all other realities, yet reduces it to that of 
which nothing can be said, except that it is." 3 The human mind 
demands more than this. We want to know what relations we, 
as finite beings, have with this infinite being, God. What 
difference does it make to me that God exists if I must remain 
forever ignorant of his nature and his relation to us? We are 
less concerned today with the proof that God exists, just as we 
are less concerned with the proof that the human self exists, and 
more concerned with the character of God and the self. To 
prove the existence of anything is at best a very meagre result 
except in so far as it leads on to a deeper insight. According to 
Green's own theory 'everything exists' of which we speak, the 

1 It may also be noticed that Green's proof for the existence of the spiritual 
principle in nature is not the cosmological proof for the existence of God. The 
spiritual principle (God) is no more the cause of the objective order as a whole 
than consciousness is the cause of its object. In each case the two are distin- 
guishable but inseparable features of a single reality. "We contradict ourselves," 
he says, "if we say that there was first a chaos and then came to be an order; for 
the 'first' and 'then' imply already an order of time, which is only possible through 
an action not in time." (Prolegomena, sec. 66.) Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 
p. 220 ff. Furthermore, Green is not giving the ontological proof. He does not 
argue from the idea of a spiritual principle to its existence; but from the existence 
of nature to a spiritual principle through which nature is possible. 

2 III, 268. Cf. also Prolegomena, sec. 51. 
8 The Evolution of Religion, Vol. I, p. 109. 



74 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

important thing being to show how it exists or in what its exist- 
ence consists. Perhaps Green expended a disproportionate 
amount of energy in showing that God is, to the neglect of a 
constructive attempt to tell us what he is, 1 but fortunately he 
has not left us wholly ignorant of his conception of God's nature. 

His most significant attempt to tell us what God is is put in 
the form of an analogy. The spiritual principle in nature is, 
he says, "analogous to that of our understanding." It may, at 
first thought, seem rather unsatisfactory to rest such a far reach- 
ing conception on an analogy. The analogy, however, is not an 
ordinary one, and is not offered as a proof of God's existence, 
nor as a complete expression of his nature, but as an assistance 
to the mind in its attempt to conceive him. Like all analogies, 
this one doubtless has its limitations, and is based on differences 
as well as similarities. 2 The differences between God and man 
are just as significant for Green's theory as are the similarities. 
The analogy is drawn between man, the as yet incomplete, 
partially self-determined individual, and God, the complete, 
wholly self-determined individual. 

God is like man in being the subject rather than an object of 
knowledge. He is not a thing, an event, a cause; by searching 
he cannot be found out. "You cannot know him," writes 
Green, "as you know a particular fact related to you, but neither 
can you so know yourself." 3 Our knowledge of both man and 
God is gained by inference; the one by reflection on the nature 
of knowledge; the other by reflection on the universal system of 
relations through which knowledge is possible. Green's attempts 
to describe God as a spiritual principle implied in nature are 
stated in terms identical with those which he used in describing 
the spiritual principle in man. The arguments by which these 
conclusions are reached are also exactly alike point by point. 
In each case, the subjective principle is discovered as the impli- 
cation of an objective order. It is, as it were, hidden from us, 
buried within the objective order, and comes to light only after 

1 Cf. Edw. Caird's criticism, Mind, O. S., VIII, 560 ff. Also John Watson, 
Philosophical Review, XVI 1 1, 161. 

2 Cf. Ill, 225. 
3 IIT, 272. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 75 

the labor of sober reflection. Green's language in describing the 
spiritual principle in nature will clearly reveal the sense in which 
God is like man. He says: " By calling the principle not natural 
we mean that it is neither included among the phenomena which 
through its presence to them form a nature, nor consists in their 
series, nor is itself determined by any of the relations which it 
constitutes among them. In saying more than this of it we must 
be careful not to fall into confusion. We are most safe in calling 
it spiritual, because, for reasons given, we are warranted in 
thinking of it as a self -distinguishing consciousness." It is 
misleading, he continues, to call it supernatural; "for we suggest 
a relation between it and nature of a kind which has really no 
place except within nature, as a relation of phenomenon to 
phenomenon. We convey the notion that it is above or beyond 
or before nature, that it is a cause of which nature is the effect, 
a substance of which the changing modes constitute nature; 
while in truth all the relations so expressed are relations which, 
indeed, but for the non-natural self-conscious subject would not 
exist, but which are not predicable of it." 1 And he sums the 
whole matter up by declaring that "we are entitled to say, 
positively, that it [i. e., the spiritual principle in nature] is a 
self -distinguishing consciousness;" and, "negatively, that the 
relations by which, through its action, phenomena are deter- 
mined are . . . not relations by which it is itself determined." 2 
So far Green treats God as "identical in principle" with the 
self-conscious human individual; but here the similarity ceases 
and difference begins. No one recognizes more fully than does 
Green the great differences between God and man. Man is 
entangled by the phenomenal order from which he is "evermore 
working himself free" in his struggle to realize the divinity within 
him and to grasp life's meaning in its entirety. God, on the 
other hand, is that ideal meaning itself. He is, therefore, all 
that it is possible for man to become. But this conception of 
God as the completion of the finite individual is a difficult one 
to express. Green resorts, at this point, to another figure of 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 54. 
1 Prolegomena, sec. 52. 



76 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

speech. We can know what this spiritual principle is only 
"through its so far acting in us as to enable us, however partially 
and interruptedly, to have knowledge of a world or an intelligent 
experience." 1 Elsewhere he tells us that God makes the animal 
organism "the vehicle" of his "communication" to man, 2 and 
that "God gradually reproduces himself in us." 3 

The meaning of all these figures is that God is the ideal or 
possible self. Man, though the true type of individual, at least 
in so far as he 'partakes of self -consciousness,' is, nevertheless 
but the promise of a complete synthesis of life's variety. "There 
is but one real world," says Green, "the intelligible, which,, 
however, is an actuality, of which to us sense is the potentiality." 4 
This gap between the potential and the actual is what gives scope 
for the growth of knowledge, which is but another name for the 
'process of actualization' under consideration. But Green 
believes that a "process of actualization presupposes a complete 
actuality which is at once its beginning and its end." 5 God is 
the ideal completion of the meaning of the finite self. 

In this conception we see the basis for Green's statement that 
we can know what God is only "piecemeal " and never adequately. 
It is the nature of an ideal to be beyond the present grasp, and 
if it is to remain an ideal it must remain beyond the grasp. There 
is this fundamental difference, however, between Green's con- 
tention that God in his completeness is forever unknown to the 
finite mind and the theory, as formulated by Spencer, that God 
is the unknowable. There is a sense in which God is unknowable, 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 51. 

2 Prolegomena, sec. 67. 

3 Prolegomena, sec. 71. The means which God uses of communicating himself 
to man are the gradual means of a rational progress in understanding the world. 
The revelation is no miraculous telling of special secrets as the result of divination 
or mystery, but the revelation of our coming to know the reality about us. Fore- 
most among the instruments of communication Green names institutions. He 
treats an institution much as Hegel does, as "an elementary effort after a regu- 
lation of life." (Prolegomena sec. 205.) Social and political institutions are the 
outward expression of the life of reason in which each rational self-consciousness 
partakes in some degree. As we become more and more law abiding or well 
regulated in life, we approach nearer and nearer to a complete apprehension of 
God's nature. It is thus that he "communicates himself to us." 

4 III, 84. 
6 III, 85. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 77 

says Edward Caird, "but to say that we cannot know God to 
perfection, is only to say that we cannot know everything; while 
to say that we cannot know Him at all is to say that we can know 
nothing. We cannot know God to perfection, because we cannot 
know the world or ourselves to perfection ; but all our knowledge 
is based on the presence of these three inseparable elements of 
consciousness within us, and all our knowledge is therefore a part 
of the knowledge of God. It is true that, just because he is the 
light of all our seeing, he can never be completely seen; for the 
return we make on the ultimate presupposition of our being can 
never be a final return." 1 It is in just this sense that Green 
holds that God is unknowable. To grasp God in his fullness 
would be to have achieved an ideal once for all, and, therefore, 
to have destroyed God and the ideal. 

That both the total system of nature and the subject through 
which such a system is possible are ideal, i. e., never actually 
realized in human experience, is, therefore, no reason for denying 
their existence. They exist as the ideal of a self-conscious 
being. Such an ideal is at the same time the highest reality 
because it is bound up with experience at every point. It is a 
characteristic feature of experience, indispensable to its very 
existence. " There may probably at first seem to be something 
offensive," says Green, "in the doctrine that the 'possible self,' 
the realization of which is the source of all action that can 
properly be called moral or immoral, is God, and that in our 
identity with it lies the true unity with God. Before it is re- 
jected, however, let it be understood. On a first hearing it may 
seem to imply that God does not actually exist at all, but is a 
mere name for an empty ideal of what each of us would like to 
become. This is a misapprehension, which a better under- 
standing of the relation between actual and possible will remove." 2 

It requires both the actual and the possible to make up a 
self conscious experience. Even in the case of the object, indeed, 
as we noticed in Chapter II, its totality is 'not there all at once.' 
An object is more than a present, limited actuality; it is a poten- 

1 The Evolution of Religion, Vol. I, 139-140. 

2 III, 224. 



78 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

tiality of the whole universe. It reaches out beyond the 'this* 
and the 'now' to find its final self in the completion of meaning 
to which it is determined through successive judgments. But 
if it is necessary to give an account of the object partly in terms 
of that which it is not yet, how much more clearly is this essen- 
tial in the case of the subject. The ideal object exists for the 
conscious subject, but the subject is capable of setting its own 
ideal. The possible object and the possible subject are, there- 
fore, real in the only truly consistent meaning of that word. To 
be real is to have "qualities and relations of its own." If, then, 
the ideal is so far related that it is indispensable to the simplest 
experience of objects, by what right do we suppose that it is not 
real? The statement that the ideal is not real, acquires its force, 
and its danger, from an equivocal use of the word real. At one 
time it is used as the opposite of unreal, and at another as a 
synonym for actual as opposed to possible. The first use has 
been shown above to be absolutely indefensible; 1 the second 
should be abandoned because it is easily confused with the first. 
If we mean that the ideal is not realized, or actualized, in finite 
experience we are merely explicating the meaning of the word. It 
is not only not achieved, but by its very nature it will never be 
achieved. 

"To say then," says Green, "that God is the final cause of 
the moral life, the ideal self which no one, as a moral agent, is, 
but which everyone, as such an agent, is however blindly seeking 
to become, is not to make him unreal. It is, however (and this 
may seem at once more presumptuous and less reasonable) , in a 
certain sense to identify him with man; and that not with an 
abstract or collective humanity but with the individual man." 2 
This highly significant quotation indicates a very important 
element in Green's conception of God, and at the same time 
more fully justifies his use of the analogy between God and man. 
God is like man in being strictly an individual. As man in knowing 
combines his several experiences into one experience without 
effacing their severalty, so God is the unifying principle in nature 
which unites but at the same time differentiates the variety of 

l Pp. 26 f. 
2 in, 225. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 79 

nature. In the same sense that thought creates its object, God 
creates the system of objects, i. e., by making the system possible. 

All idealistic philosophies have been frequently charged with 
neglecting the claims of life's variety in favor of its unity. Green, 
however, has, in reality, forestalled such criticism in his treat- 
ment of the individual and in identifying God "with the indi- 
vidual man." If it is particularity, abstract, and void of uni- 
versal relations, which the objectors are desirous of saving from 
Green's conclusion, it is altogether too late to protest when a 
discussion of God is reached. The mere particular not only 
does not exist in the infinite, but it does not exist in the finite. 
The criticism is, therefore, beside the mark; for the mere par- 
ticular exists nowhere, in heaven or earth. If, on the other 
hand, the critics fear that the individual is lost in the infinite, 
we have but to recall Green's definition of the real as that which 
has "qualities and relations of its own" to be convinced that 
such fears are without foundation. God is not said to be an 
ideal universal in which all particularity is swallowed up, but an 
ideal individual in which particularity and universality are 
united. 1 How can any individual thing which has "qualities 
and relations of its own" become less real or in danger of losing 
its reality altogether by the extension or intension of those 
qualities or relations through, or in, an ideally complete indi- 
viduality? 

Such criticism appears to tell against Green's philosophy for 
those only who persist in thinking of definition as a kind of 
abstraction; in a word, for those who still remain enslaved by the 
conceptions of formal logic. The exposition of Green's position 
on this point has already been given in Chapter II. There it was 
pointed out that for him a thing does not become less but more 
real as it is determined; the undetermined, being the only non- 
existent. Far from being the undetermined, Green holds that 
God is the highest reality and, therefore, the most, or even the 
completely determined being. It is the great virtue of the 
philosophy of individuality that it is peculiarly capable of re- 
taining the many and the one in their truth ; for it never separates 

1 See Green's discussion of Berkeley's conception of God as a jue-ya $&ov. 1, 157 ff . 



80 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

them. As it does not begin its speculation with the abstract 
particular, so it never ends with the abstract universal. Some 
kind of a unity in variety is the only solution which can satisfy 
the two fundamental demands of thought; but if the initial 
separation is once made between the particular and the uni- 
versal, there can be no ultimately satisfactory synthesis. For 
through the procedure imposed by the method which has been 
adopted, thought is distorted and falsified, and reality is alienated 
at the very threshold of speculation. The sane and fundamental 
demand for a genuine rationalization of reality is made impossible 
of satisfaction by an arbitrary and abstract procedure of thought. 
The most hopeful way, therefore, is found in the way of indi- 
viduality which Green has chosen. 

"Logically," says Dewey, "all ultimates are alike; the differ- 
ence between the Unconscious of von Hartmann, the Unknowable 
of Spencer, the Will of Schopenhauer, and the Thought or Self- 
consciousness of some of the Neo-Hegelians is not an intellectually 
definable difference." 1 But surely this is a most surprising 
statement. It is of course possible to use the term Thought or 
Self-consciousness without realizing what this principle involves ; 
but as used by Green the term 'Self-consciousness' is radically 
different from the other ultimates with which it is here so 
strangely classed. Indeed, there is all the difference which 
obtains between substance and subject or between mechanism 
■and teleology. 2 If the ultimate is defined or conceived in terms 
f of the abstract or merely logical universal, we have a very different 
-sort of ultimate from one conceived as an individual. The one 
is the absolutely undetermined and indeterminable, and there- 
lore, according to Green, the unreal; the other is the completely 
determined and ultimate reality. The one is the summum genus 
of the formal logicians; the other, unity in variety typified in 
the concrete judgment. One depends on subsumption under 
classes; the other on articulation by relation. The one tends to 

1 John Dewey, Philosophical Review, XIX, p. 188. 

2 1 do not wish to raise the question of the interpretation of the several ulti- 
mates mentioned, but merely to deny that 'all ultimates are alike,' and to suggest 
the essential difference between Green's ' Self -consciousness ' which is individual 
and other ultimates which are merely universal. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 8 1 

obliterate distinctions; the other to preserve them. The one 
essentially denies multiplicity and development ; the other affirms 
and interprets them. The one is reached by leaving out attri- 
butes; the other, by increasing determination. The one repre- 
sents the extinction of the individual life and value; the other, 
their ideal completion. Such is the difference between the 
concrete individual of Green's system and the abstract universal 
of some others. It is comparatively easy to reach a conclusion 
in philosophy by ignoring a half of thought's demands. To 
take our stand for the ultimate unity or the ultimate variety of 
life is to solve too easily the gravest of philosophical problems. 
Green's mind could not rest after such a meagre sabbath day's 
journey but was compelled to press on to that goal of philo- 
sophical reflection — the interpretation of the paradox of the 
one and the many. This is an ancient and ever recurring demand 
of the human spirit which will not be thrust lightly aside by 
nominalism on the one hand, or realism on the other. 

In evaluating any system of philosophy today the most per- 
sistent question is "How does it square with the doctrine and 
method of evolution?" To test the truth of any theory it is 
necessary to see whether the theory takes due account of change 
and leaves room for real development or whether it attempts to 
define reality in static terms. Such a test, although it may 
appear somewhat artificial when applied to theories developed 
before men were stirred by the new conception of change and 
development which grew out of the Darwinian revolution in 
biology, cannot be out of place when dealing with a philosophy 
written so recently as that of Green. Green, who was in the 
very midst of the controversies aroused by the new theories, 
was, perhaps, the most discriminating and independent philo- 
sophical writer of the time. He was certainly the most im- 
portant of those who were convinced of the essential limitations 
of the Darwinian hypothesis when raised to the rank of a phi- 
losophy. His well known opposition to the evolutionary phi- 
losophers of his day, Spencer in particular, has led many serious 
students to discredit Green's philosophy without further exami- 
nation on the ground that it is an antiquated semi-theological 



82 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

system which has very little significance for the modern mind. 
Now, however, that Spencer's theories are no longer accepted 
without qualification in evolutionary philosophy, 1 it is profitable 
to turn to the philosophy of his most discerning contemporary 
and philosophical opponent. What was Green's attitude 
toward evolution, and in what sense, if any, does his own phi- 
losophy provide a basis for genuine change or growth? 

Beginning with the examination of the object, and proceeding 
through a consideration of the spiritual principle in man and 
nature, Green has never lost sight of process. He shows, first, 
that no object exists in isolation, but that it is the very essence 
of the object to be related to other objects in a common world. 
We make a mistake, however, if we suppose that the relations 
of an object are so simple that they can be summed up in a 
definition, or so few that they can be completely tabulated and 
quantified. To be defined is the very soul of a real object, 
yet an object is always infinitely more than a given definition; 
in Green's language "it is capable of infinitely numerous other 
determinations." 2 Here is surely room for process or growth 
of some kind, and it is just at this point that his theory of objec- 
tivity is seen to have a direct bearing on evolution. According 
to the old formal logic, the object falls within a class, that class 
within a higher class, and so on until the highest class or genus 
is reached. The highest genus, since it includes everything else 
within it, is the least differentiated and the most abstract; while 
the individual object is thought of as there in a fixed or given 
reality, impaled forever by a name. Green reverses all this: 
in his philosophy no object is complete or finally made, but it is, 
in the true sense of the word, in the making. The object is 
universal through relations which are inexhaustible and infinite 
so that it is never quite complete. Green's abandonment of 
formal logic should satisfy the most radical, but he does not 
stop here. He postulates a total system of nature as a basis 
for change. To be sure, this system is represented as an ideal 

1 Cf. Bergson's criticism of Spencer. Creative Evolution, pp. 188 and 363 ff.; 
also J. Royce, Herbert Spencer, An Estimate and Review; also J. T. Merz, A History 
of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. Ill, p. 51. 

2 III, 56. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 83 

system, but it is, nevertheless, said to be a "permanent system." 
This reveals a note of paradox. The question at once arises, 
'How shall we harmonize the infinite development of the object 
with a permanent system of objects?' "For reason," Green 
writes "(and, except for reason, there is no nature at all), 
nature is a system of becoming, which rests on unchangeable 
conditions." 1 

Is it possible to meet this dilemma without denying the reality 
either of the permanence or of the change? This really consti- 
tutes the problem of modern philosophy. If the human mind 
could rest satisfied with either horn of the dilemma, the problem 
would have been solved long before our day and philosophers 
would not now be interested in it. As it is, every philosophy 
which pretends to rise above the plane of unreflective tradition 
must cope with the problem anew. Does Green's system leave 
room for real change or is change after all lost in permanence? 
In the language of Bosanquet: "How can progress be all included 
in, and belong to a timeless reality?" 2 

It is impossible to answer such questions except by reference 
to a subject for whom these relations exist. " It is," says Green, 
"the consciousness of possibilities in ourselves, unrealized but 
constantly in process of realization, that alone enables us to 
read the idea of development into what we observe of natural 
life, and to conceive that there must be such a thing as a plan 
of the world." 3 The very condition of there being such a world, 
ordered in intelligible ways, is the consciousness of that world. 
If we would understand Green's notion of development, there- 
fore, we must pass from the world of objects to the world of 
subjects. The relation of objects to each other in experience, 
whether that relation be one of development or of simple exist- 
ence, implies a principle related to the series as knower to known, 
but not itself knowable in serial or quasi-serial forms. There is 
a unity in this experience taken as a whole ; but it is not another 
unit over and above the unitary objects which it knows. This 
is the true individual ; for in consciousness the many and the one 

1 II, 74 and 75. Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 18. 

2 The Value and Destiny of the Individual (1913), p. 71. 

8 Prolegomena, sec. 186. 



84 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

are intimately and organically related so that the many are truly 
many in one. Human consciousness, indeed, like the object, is 
incomplete. It is, however, growing more and more complete; 
and, in addition to the mere fact of growth or development, it is 
capable of setting or apprehending its own completion as its goal 
of development. The goal of human struggle may be called 
indifferently the possible self, or God. Like the ideal object which 
is a complete and permanent system of nature, God may be 
said to be the complete self, the eternal self -consciousness, 
through which complete nature is possible. 

Such is Green's account of the individual. Individuality is 
discoverable in the remotest germ or fragment of knowledge; 
there is no abstract particular. On the other hand, reality as a 
whole is also an individual; there is no abstract universal. The 
individuality of the object is the same in kind as the individuality 
of a system of nature; and the individuality of the simplest act 
of knowledge is the individuality of an eternal and complete 
consciousness. What sort of evolution does such a plan allow? 

In the first place, it may be worth while to point out that for 
Green evolution cannot be defined in terms of motion in space. 
Change of place is not development. This statement may 
seem so obvious that there is danger of forgetting that attempts 
have been made to define evolution by just this kind of change. 
Spencer believes that the problem of philosophy is to find "the 
law of the continuous redistribution of matter and motion,'" 1 and 
defines evolution as "an integration of matter and dissipation of 
motion." 2 Nevertheless, it has now become a commonplace 
that no amount of rearrangement of things in space can really 
be a process of evolution. 3 

Secondly, change of time is not development. This statement 
is perhaps less obviously true, but none the less really so. We 
get into the habit of thinking that it is the essential characteristic 
of evolution to consume time. Green warns us against an 
uncritical acceptance of this belief. "We must be on our guard," 
he says, "against lapsing into the notion that a process ad 

1 First Principles, sec. 92. 

2 First Principles, sec. 97. 

3 Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 363 ff. 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 85 

infinitum, a process not relative to an end, can be a process of 
development at all." 1 Simple duration is probably a sine qua 
non of any real development, but development itself cannot be 
wholly reduced to duration. Even space could be shown to be 
an indispensable condition of all development since it is actually 
in a space-time world that our term 'development' has any 
significance. But, on the other hand, development is infinitely 
more than any mere shifting in space or time. It must be 
change toward a more valuable or higher state. There is an 
element of valuation, therefore, underlying all true development, 
an element which is not and can not be a matter of spatial or 
temporal sequence. Mere duration or existence prolonged is 
no better than existence. The truth seems to be that develop- 
ment is nothing if we try to define it in terms of a simple ' before ' 
and 'after.' The sequence must be, or is, a significant before 
and after. The burden of Green's philosophy is that significance 
is the universal mark of reality. Development, like every other 
aspect of the world, must, consequently, have a meaning and a 
value before it can be truly real. But the condition of all value, 
as we have previously shown, is individuality made possible 
through judgment of a self -distinguishing consciousness, capable 
of apprehending and striving for an ideal. It is, indeed, not at 
all clear how any change could take place without this guiding 
thread of an ideal end, but it is certain that orderly change (the 
very essence of the idea of evolution) would be impossible with- 
out it. Progress will, therefore, consist in the constant realiza- 
tion of an immanent ideal. 

It may readily be admitted that Green's philosophy does not 
lay any special significance on the reality of time. If evolution 
is possible only on a theory which admits that time is an ulti- 
mate and independent reality, then Green's theory does not 
furnish a basis for evolution. He is apparently committed to the 
belief that the total and permanent system of relations is not in 
time; man is not in time; God is not in time; reality itself is not 
in time. Notwithstanding this, he continues to speak confi- 
dently of change and development. The explanation of this 

1 Prolegomena, sec. 189. 



86 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

paradox is found in the observation that none of the terms which 
Green uses in discussing development are names for objects of 
knowledge. The whole growth takes place in a spiritual world; 
from the single fact to the universal system of facts nothing can 
be pointed out as 'here' or 'now.' In an earlier section it was 
shown that it is only in a world of objects that the categories of 
time, space, cause, et cetera, have an application. ' This thing is 
behind that,' or 'the sound followed the blow,' and all other 
similar judgments are dependent upon these mechanical relations 
for their meaning; but the meaning of one of them is not related 
to the meaning of another in the same or a similar way, i. e. t no 
meaning fills more space than another, or takes more time. On 
the other hand, what ideas or meanings lose in this sort of 
existential reality they gain in a dynamic or developmental 
character. One meaning does not cause another, but one 
meaning grows out of another and this kind of growth is not 
dependent upon time for its significance. Briefly, Green's 
contention is that time is a category of meaning, not meaning a 
category of time. Whatever development such a system allows 
will be infinitely more than a temporal sequence, and an account 
of that development will be infinitely more than a 'natural 
history.' This kind of growth cannot be registered by the ticks 
of a clock, but must be told in stages of individuality. 1 It must 
be recorded in terms of the fragmentary and the more complete; 
the germ and the full fruit. The spirit does not grow from hour 
to hour but from less to greater perfection, not from particularity 
to universality, but from individuality to individuality. Such a 
development is best observed in the growth of the human soul. 2 
We have seen that God has been defined as the ideally com- 

1 The first part of this conception closely resembles Bergson's notion that ' pure 
duration' is not made up of moments of time. The second part, however, that 
development consists in realizing an immanent ideal, or that the germ of all is 
in the merest fragment of reality, seems to be foreign to Bergson's philosophy. 

2 As pointed out when discussing the relation of consciousness and the time 
series (Chapter IV), Green has no intention of abstracting spirit from the temporal 
order, but merely insists that we shall distinguish the relation of spirit to time 
from the relations in time. In this connection he applies the same general theory 
to the question of development. We must learn to distinguish the concrete relation 
of growth (which undoubtedly has a temporal aspect) and the abstract relation of 
a mere 'before and after.' 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 87 

plete individual correlative with a system of reality through 
which all individuality is made possible. God is, therefore, 
identical in principle, but infinitely removed in degree from the 
finite individual. Such an interpretation of the nature of God 
frees Green at once from the charge of holding to a static abso- 
lute. God is not a predetermined goal to which we are coming 
nearer at each stage until at some far off future time we shall 
have attained it. God is in the process of being realized, in the 
sense that the ideal of the artist is forever being realized, although 
never actually realized because the ideal recedes as it is approxi- 
mated, or better, the ideal is literally created in the process of 
actualization. "The ideal exists," writes Green, "in his [the 
artist's] consciousness, yet not in its full reality, for if it did it 
would be no longer an ideal." 1 

Our struggle is a permanent process of becoming complete 
individuals, and is based upon an ideally complete individual 
apprehended by the finite self. It is to be noted that the rela- 
tion of the actual to the possible is in this case not quite the same 
as it is in the partial and complete object. Such a process as we 
see exhibited in the growth of an acorn into an oak will hardly 
illustrate self-realization since the case is in some measure 
abstract, both of the terms being externalized. We cannot, for 
example, properly say that an acorn is forever becoming an 

1 III, 269. Compare with this view Bergson's remark that "no one, not even 
the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict 
it would have been to produce it before it was produced — an absurd hypothesis 
which is its own refutation. Even so with regard to the moments of our life, of 
which we are the artisans. Each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the 
talent of the painter is formed or deformed — in any case, is modified — under the 
very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its 
issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are just assum- 
ing." {Creative Evolution, p. 6.) There is this difference, however, between 
Green and Bergson: Bergson recognizes the actual incompleteness of any judg- 
ment just as Green does, but from this fact concludes that judgment must be cast 
aside, knowledge abandoned, and intuition substituted for it. By intuition he 
hopes to grasp that which for knowledge is an ideal. Green, on the other hand, 
while holding that the actual nature of ultimate reality is never quite grasped by 
knowledge, still holds that knowledge, or judgment, is the only means we have of 
grasping the ultimate. Indeed, it is just this paradox which, according to Green, 
constitutes the significance of consciousness. The ultimate is truly forever beyond, 
but beyond as an ideal is forever beyond conscious attainment. As the ideal 
makes the struggle significant, so the ideal infinite is the basis of finite valuation. 



88 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

oak but never becomes one, because the ideal oak is one set up 
by an agency other than the acorn itself. "The acorn," says 
Green, "is in possibility identical with the oak, but the oak is 
nothing to the acorn. That is, the acorn has no consciousness 
which its virtual identity with the oak affects. The identity 
exists, not for it, but for a consciousness to which oak and acorn 
are alike relative. But in the process constituting the moral 
life, . . . the germ and the development, the possibility and 
its actualization, are one and the same consciousness of self. 
That in virtue of which I am I, and can in consequence so set 
before myself the realization of my own possibilities as to be a 
moral agent, is that in virtue of which I am one with God." 1 

Such a system of philosophy offers the only true basis for a 
genuine evolution because the ideal is dynamic. The world 
in its totality is not a closed system. We cannot predict the 
future in detail. Although we know in general that it will be 
intelligible, we do not know the exact terms in which its intel- 
ligibility will appear. 

It is a singular fact that the two most insistent criticisms 
of Green's philosophy cancel each other. On the one hand, the 
objection is raised that his philosophy allows no room for change; 
and on the other hand, that the process is interminable. That 
God is a fixed goal has already been sufficiently refuted by the 
foregoing account of the nature of an ideal. The ideal is that 
for which we ever strive but at which we never arrive. It is 
such a notion of an eternal process to which the second objection 
is raised. "Why a completely realized self should think it 
worth while," says Professor Dewey, "to duplicate itself in an 
unrealized, or relatively empty, self, how it could possibly do 
this even if it were thought worth while, and why after the com- 
plete self had produced the incomplete self, it should do so under 
conditions rendering impossible (seemingly eternally so) any 
adequate approach of the incomplete self to its own complete- 
ness . . . should make us wary of the conception." 2 If we are 

1 III, 226. Cf. especially Prolegomena, sec. 187. 

2 Philosophical Review, II, 654. If our interpretation is correct Green would 
be the first to agree with Professor Dewey's conclusion expressed at the close of the 
article cited. "The fixed ideal is an distinctly the bane of ethical science today 



GOD: THE COMPLETE INDIVIDUAL. 89 

to understand that the 'Why?', to which the critic is seeking an 
answer, is synonymous with the question "Why is the universe 
as it is?", no one can hope to answer him. Green, for one, does 
not attempt such a demonstration. 1 In the words of Bosanquet, 
"All explanation is within the universe, not of it." 2 But if, 
on the other hand, the critic is complaining because Green did 
not set up a static goal, 'some far off divine event,' which might 
one day be reached, he is unconsciously crediting Green with the 
only basis for a true theory of development. Green's strength 
is shown in his refusal to adopt this type of explanation. 

This result is unintelligible to a mechanical or naturalistic 
philosophy, which moves always within the most superficial 
aspect of the world of objectivity. In the world of objects we 
know that a goal is set up at the end of a course and that the 
runners approach it until they arrive, or pass beyond it. 3 This 
naive view of reality can only be overcome by the way of some 
such philosophy of the individual as Green has given. The 
shell of objectivity must be pierced to the very soul and then 
mechanism will be seen to rest on individuality. In reality 
itself the start and the goal and the runner are all included, but 
included in such a way as to preserve their severalty. There 

as the fixed universe of mediaevalism was the bane of the natural science of the 
Renascence." (P. 664. Italics mine.) It is but fair to say that in all of Green's 
talk of ideals he seems nowhere to refer to a fixed ideal. Perhaps he did not recog- 
nize that there could be such an ideal. 

1 Cf. Prolegomena, sec. 82. 

2 Logic (second edition), I, 137. 

3 Here lies the fallacy of likening life to a game or a race where the goal may 
actually be reached. On the other hand, we are not assisted by supposing the goal 
to be a sort of mobile will-o'-the-wisp which goes on before us into the surrounding 
darkness, because we are still entangled with mechanical metaphors. Caird has 
better expressed the nature of the struggle; "It is true that 'the margin' of know- 
ledge ' fades forever and forever as we move ' ; but, if we might correct the metaphor, 
it fades not before us merely, but also into us. We are not condemned to chase a 
phantom which continually flies before us, so that we are as near to it at first as at 
last. Rather, we are pursuing a course of self-development in which we are con- 
tinually realizing more deeply and fully what the world, the object of all our thought 
and action, is, and what we are, who think and act upon it; and in which, by neces- 
sary consequence, we are continually learning more of God, who is the ultimate 
unity of our own life and of the life of the world." (The Evolution of Religion, Vol. 
I, pp. 139-140.) We make our own goal; we seek it; we fail to grasp it; not because 
it eludes our grasp, but because we despise it in the light of another. 



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90 INDIVIDUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY OF GREEN. 

is no better characterization of reality than in terms of indi- 
viduality. 

Whatever process there is in reality must, therefore, be an 
internal process of concretion; the very process, exhibited in 
the growth of individuality in which the finite individual, in 
being able to know, and to will an end, is already, in principle, 
one with the infinite individual. This is a significant change. 
Moreover, if the process is to remain significant the goal must 
remain beyond the present grasp. The key to Green's philosophy 
is found in the significance of individuality made possible in a 
world of struggle for completion. 



INDEX 



Kant, I., method of, 2 ff., 9 ff. 





■7«. 


, 20 n 










w n„ 


68 n. 










fi6 «. 












'46 n., 


47 w. 


48 w., 


52 


w., 




73«-» 


82 n. 


84«., 


86 


n., 


Wj- 


, 24 fi 


, 79 w 








B^ 


23. 


38 w. 


41 n 




42, 


■.. 83, 89 










We. 


16 « 


., 28, 


41 n„ 


52 


«., 


H. ard, 


2 w., 


4«., 


73-74 


n., 


77. 


K>/m, 11 












fy, 60 ff 












'usness, 


44 ff. 


, 60 ff., 74. 


( 


See 


w 












n, 63 ff . 













Jin, Charles, 2, 81. 
im. (See Farf.) 
Partes, Rene, 46, 47 «. 
;ey, John, 80, 88. 

Jistwood, A., 19 w. 

'mpiricism, weakness of, 8. 
Evolution, 2, 55 ff., 81 ff. 
Experience, 10. 



and fancy, 27; 



Fact, nature of, 3ff.; 
and judgment, 38 ff. 
Fairbr other, W. H., 5. 
Fichte, J. G., 47 n. 
Fullerton, G. S., 5 n. 



God, the complete individual, 67 ff.; and 
nature, 72; and man, 74 ff.; Berkeley's 
conception of, 79 ff. 

Green, T. H., not a psychologist, 3ff.; 
method of, 9 ff.; problem of, 2 ff. 

Haldane, R. B., 4 n. 

Haldar, H., 19 n. 

Hegel, G. W. F., 9 ff., 17, 51 n., 65, 76 n. 

Hume, David, 8 ff., 16, 18, 24, 48 ff. 

Individual defined, iv, 33. 

Johnson, R. B. C., ion., 19 w. 

Judgment, identified with meaning, 
36 ff . ; simplest component of knowl- 
edge, 38 ff.; process of individualiza- 
tion, 39 ff . ; germ of knowledge, 40 ff . ; 
hypothetical character of, 41 ff- 



Locke, John, 1, 14 ff., 24, 31, 39, 46, 50; 

method of, 8 ff. 
Logic, formal, 31. 

Meaning, 35 ff. 
Merz, J. T., 82 n. 
Metaphysics, problem of, 2 ff. 
Method, Green's objective, 12. 

Nature, Green's definition of, 12. 
Nettleship, R. L., 62 n. 

Object, individuality of, 18 ff.; consti- 
tuted by relations, 20 ff.; of sense 
versus object of knowledge, 21 ff. 

Pattison, Mark, 16 n. 

Psychology, problem of, 3 ff.; method 

of, 8 ff . ; facts of, not questioned by 

Green, 3. 

Real, not distinguished from unreal, 

27 ff. 
Reality, and consciousness, 13 ff.; and 

knowledge, 21. 
Reid, Thomas, 23. 
Ritchie, D. G., 13, 58. 
Royce, Josiah, 47 »., 82 n. 



distinguished from 



Scepticism, 18. 
Science, field of, 

philosophy, 3 f. 
Sensation, mere sensation does not exist, 

28 ff. 
Seth, Andrew, 4 n., 64 n., 65. 
Sidgwick, H., q n. 
Space, 50 ff. 
Spencer, H., 81 ff. 
Spinoza, 51 n., 62 n. 
Spiritual Principle, 12, 44. 
Stout, G. F., 7 n. 
Sturt, Henry, 5 ff. 

Subject, individuality of, 46 ff., 62 ff. 
Subjectivism, 6 ff., 23 ff. 
Substance, 50 ff. 

Taylor, A. E., 7 «., 56 ff. 

Time, 53 ff. 

Thing-in-itself, 13 ff. 

Thought, false conception of, 29 ff . 

Wallace, William, 21. 
Ward, James, 47 n. 
Watson, John, 74 n. 



91 



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